Will it bore you, my dear Dick, if I tell you of an old Indian’s death?  It seems a pretty and touching story.  Old Pe-shau-ba was a friend of Tanner.  One day he fell violently ill.  He sent for Tanner and said to him:  “I remember before I came to live in this world, I was with the Great Spirit above.  I saw many good and desirable things, and among others a beautiful woman.  And the Great Spirit said:  ’Pe-shau-ba, do you love the woman?’ I told him I did.  Then he said, ’Go down and spend a few winters on earth.  You cannot stay long, and you must remember to be always kind and good to my children whom you see below.’  So I came down, but I have never forgotten what was said to me.

“I have always stood in the smoke between the two bands when my people fought with their enemies . . .  I now hear the same voice that talked to me before I came into the world.  It tells me I can remain here no longer.”  He then walked out, looked at the sun, the sky, the lake, and the distant hills; then came in, lay down composedly in his place, and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.

If we would hardly care to live like Indians, after all (and Tanner tired of it and came back, an old man, to the States), we might desire to die like Pe-shau-ba, if, like him, we had been “good and kind to God’s children whom we meet below.”  So here is a Christmas moral for you, out of a Red Indian book, and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

APPENDIX I

Reynolds’s Peter Bell.

When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds ("A Friend of Keats”) was written, I had not seen his “Peter Bell” (Taylor and Hessey, London, 1888).  This “Lyrical Ballad” is described in a letter of Keats’s published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in Macmillan’s Magazine, August, 1888.  The point of Reynolds’s joke was to produce a parody before the original.  Reynolds was annoyed by what Hood called “The Betty Foybles” of Wordsworth, and by the demeanour of a poet who was serious, not only in season, but out of season.  Moreover, Wordsworth had damned “a pretty piece of heathenism” by Keats, with praise which was faint even from Wordsworth to a contemporary.  In the circumstances, as Wordsworth was not yet a kind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills, and hear chanting the swan song of the dying England, perhaps Reynolds’s parody scarce needs excuse.  Mr. Ainger calls it “insolent,” meaning that it has an unkind tone of personal attack.  That is, unluckily, true, but to myself the parody appears remarkably funny, and quite worthy of “the sneering brothers, the vile Smiths,” as Lamb calls the authors of “Rejected Addresses.”  Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not see the fun of the parody—­perhaps it is as well that we should fail to see the fun of jests broken on our friends.  But will any Wordsworthian deny to-day the humour of this?—­