It is very certain that Christianity, as illustrated by the Virginians, did not make a good impression on these savages.  They were always willing to compare their own religion with that of the whites, and generally regarded the contrast as in their favor.  One of them said to Colonel Barnett, the commissioner to run the boundary-line of lands ceded by the Indians, “As to religion, you go to your churches, sing loud, pray loud, and make great noise.  The red people meet once a year at the feast of New Corn, extinguish all their fires and kindle up a new one, the smoke of which ascends to the Great Spirit as a grateful incense and sacrifice.  Now what better is your religion than ours?” One of the chiefs, it is said, received an Episcopal divine who wished to indoctrinate him into the mystery of the Trinity.  The Indian, who was a “model of deportment,” heard his argument; and then, when he was through, began in turn to indoctrinate the divine in his faith, speaking of the Great Spirit, whose voice was the thunder, whose eye was the sun.  The clergyman interrupted him rather rudely, saying, “But that is not true,—­that is all heathen trash!” The chief turned to his companions and said gravely, “This is the most impolite man I have ever met; he has just declared that he has three gods, and now will not let me have one!”

The valley of Virginia, its El Dorado in every sense, had a different settlement, and by a different people.  They were, for the most part, Germans, of the same class with those that settled in the great valleys of Pennsylvania, and who have made so large a portion of that State into a rich ingrain-carpet of cultivation upon a floor of limestone.  One day the history of the Germans of Pennsylvania and Virginia will be written, and it will be full of interest and value.  They were the first strong sinews strung in the industrial arm of the Colonies to which they came; and although mingled with nearly every European race, they remain to this day a distinct people.  A partition-wall rarely broken down has always inclosed them, and to this, perhaps, is due that slowness of progress which marks them.  The restless ambition of Le Grand Monarque and the cruelties of Turenne converted the beautiful valley of the Rhine into a smoking desert, and the wretched peasantry of the Palatinate fled from their desolated firesides to seek a more hospitable home in the forests of New York and Pennsylvania, and thence, somewhat later, found their way into Virginia.  The exodus of the Puritans has had more celebrity, but was scarcely attended with more hardship and heroism.  The greater part of the German exiles landed in America stripped of their all.  They came to the forests of the Susquehanna and the Shenandoah armed only with the woodman’s axe.  They were ignorant and superstitious, and brought with them the legends of their fatherland.  The spirits of the Hartz Mountains and the genii of the Black Forest, which Christianity