“’Tis just so with me,” answered the sailor, as the two walked towards the block, too much occupied with their respective morality to remember at the moment the melancholy errand they were on; “that’s just my way of feeling and reasoning.  How often have I felt, when near shipwreck, the relief of not owning the craft!  ’If she goes,’ I have said to myself, ’why, my life goes with her, but not my property, and there’s great comfort in that.’  I’ve discovered, in the course of boxing about the world from the Horn to Cape North, not to speak of this run on a bit of fresh water, that if a man has a few dollars, and puts them in a chest under lock and key, he is pretty certain to fasten up his heart in the same till; and so I carry pretty much all I own in a belt round my body, in order, as I say, to keep the vitals in the right place.  D—–­ me, Pathfinder, if I think a man without a heart any better than a fish with a hole in his air-bag.”

“I don’t know how that may be, Master Cap; but a man without a conscience is but a poor creatur’, take my word for it, as any one will discover who has to do with a Mingo.  I trouble myself but little with dollars or half-joes, for these are the favoryte coin in this part of the world; but I can easily believe, by what I’ve seen of mankind, that if a man has a chest filled with either, he may be said to lock up his heart in the same box.  I once hunted for two summers, during the last peace, and I collected so much peltry that I found my right feelings giving way to a craving after property; and if I have consarn in marrying Mabel, it is that I may get to love such things too well, in order to make her comfortable.”

“You’re a philosopher, that’s clear, Pathfinder; and I don’t know but you’re a Christian.”

“I should be out of humor with the man that gainsayed the last, Master Cap.  I have not been Christianized by the Moravians, like so many of the Delawares, it is true; but I hold to Christianity and white gifts.  With me, it is as on-creditable for a white man not to be a Christian as it is for a red-skin not to believe in his happy hunting-grounds; indeed, after allowing for difference in traditions, and in some variations about the manner in which the spirit will be occupied after death, I hold that a good Delaware is a good Christian, though he never saw a Moravian; and a good Christian a good Delaware, so far as natur ’is consarned.  The Sarpent and I talk these matters over often, for he has a hankerin’ after Christianity —­ "

“The d—–­l he has!” interrupted Cap.  “And what does he intend to do in a church with all the scalps he takes?”

“Don’t run away with a false idee, friend Cap, don’t run away with a false idee.  These things are only skin-deep, and all depend on edication and nat’ral gifts.  Look around you at mankind, and tell me why you see a red warrior here, a black one there, and white armies in another place?  All this, and a great deal more of the same kind that I could point out, has been ordered for some special purpose; and it is not for us to fly in the face of facts and deny their truth.  No, no; each color has its gifts, and its laws, and its traditions; and one is not to condemn another because he does not exactly comprehend it.”