A person who had seen them during great part of a life expressed his prejudices to me with such violence, that I was no longer surprised that the Indian children threw sticks at him, as he passed.  A lady said:  “Do what you will for them, they will be ungrateful.  The savage cannot be washed out of them.  Bring up an Indian child, and see if you can attach it to you.”  The next moment, she expressed, in the presence of one of those children whom she was bringing up, loathing at the odor left by one of her people, and one of the most respected, as he passed through the room.  When the child is grown, she will be considered basely ungrateful not to love the lady, as she certainly will not; and this will be cited as an instance of the impossibility of attaching the Indian.

Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and intelligence from, the white man, have been civilized and made a valuable ingredient in the new state, I will not say; but this we are sure of,—­the French Catholics, at least, did not harm them, nor disturb their minds merely to corrupt them.  The French, they loved.  But the stern Presbyterian, with his dogmas and his task-work, the city circle and the college, with their niggard concessions and unfeeling stare, have never tried the experiment.  It has not been tried.  Our people and our government have sinned alike against the first-born of the soil, and if they are the fated agents of a new era, they have done nothing,—­have invoked no god to keep them sinless while they do the hest of fate.

Worst of all is it, when they invoke the holy power only to mask their iniquity; when the felon trader, who, all the week, has been besotting and degrading the Indian with rum mixed with red pepper, and damaged tobacco, kneels with him on Sunday before a common altar, to tell the rosary which recalls the thought of Him crucified for love of suffering men, and to listen to sermons in praise of “purity"!!

“My savage friends,” cries the old, fat priest, “you must, above all things, aim at purity.”

Oh! my heart swelled when I saw them in a Christian church.  Better their own dog-feasts and bloody rites than such mockery of that other faith.

“The dog,” said an Indian, “was once a spirit; he has fallen for his sin, and was given by the Great Spirit, in this shape, to man, as his most intelligent companion.  Therefore we sacrifice it in highest honor to our friends in this world,—­to our protecting geniuses in another.”

There was religion in that thought.  The white man sacrifices his own brother, and to Mammon, yet he turns in loathing from, the dog-feast.

“You say,” said the Indian of the South to the missionary, “that Christianity is pleasing to God.  How can that be?—­Those men at Savannah are Christians.”

Yes! slave-drivers and Indian traders are called Christians, and the Indian is to be deemed less like the Son of Mary than they!  Wonderful is the deceit of man’s heart!