to which he has been accustomed, it is within the very nature, tentative and elastic, of the gesture art—­both performers being on an equality—­that he should adopt the one that seems to be recognized or that is pressed upon him, as with much greater difficulty he has learned and adopted many foreign terms used with whites before attempting to acquire their language, but never with his own race.  Thus there is now, and perhaps always has been, what may be called a lingua-franca, in the sign vocabulary.  It is well known that all the tribes of the Plains having learned by experience that white visitors expect to receive certain signs really originating with the latter, use them in their intercourse just as they sometimes do the words “squaw” and “papoose,” corruptions of the Algonkian, and once as meaningless in the present West as the English terms “woman” and “child,” but which the first pioneers, having learned them on the Atlantic coast, insisted upon treating as generally intelligible.

The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a wrong significance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote found in several versions and in several languages, but repeated as a veritable Scotch legend by Duncan Anderson, esq., Principal of the Glasgow Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, when he visited Washington in 1853.

King James I. of England, desiring to play a trick upon the Spanish ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a crotchet in his head upon sign language, informed him that there was a distinguished professor of that science in the university at Aberdeen.  The ambassador set out for that place, preceded by a letter from the King with instructions to make the best of him.  There was in the town one Geordy, a butcher, blind of one eye, a fellow of much wit and drollery.  Geordy is told to play the part of a professor, with the warning not to speak a word; is gowned, wigged, and placed in a chair of state, when the ambassador is shown in and they are left alone together.  Presently the nobleman came out greatly pleased with the experiment, claiming that his theory was demonstrated.  He said:  “When I entered the room I raised one finger to signify there is one God.  He replied by raising two fingers to signify that this Being rules over two worlds, the material and the spiritual.  Then I raised three fingers, to say there are three persons in the Godhead.  He then closed his fingers, evidently to say these three are one.”  After this explanation on the part of the nobleman the professors sent for the butcher and asked him what took place in the recitation room.  He appeared very angry and said:  “When the crazy man entered the room where I was he raised one finger, as much as to say I had but one eye, and I raised two fingers to signify that I could see out of my one eye as well as he could out of both of his.  When he raised three fingers, as much as to say there were but three eyes between us, I doubled up my fist, and if he had not gone out of that room in a hurry I would have knocked him down.”