This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of squalid humanity sat patiently without the charmed circle of the camp and waited for such crumbs as pity might bestow upon their misery.  There were old and young, brown-skinned and yellow.  Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for one hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in the East,) but all the women and children looked worn and sad, and distressed with hunger.  They reminded me much of Indians, did these people.  They had but little clothing, but such as they had was fanciful in character and fantastic in its arrangement.  Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they had they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention most readily.  They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.

These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in the noble red man, too:  they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark.

The little children were in a pitiable condition—­they all had sore eyes, and were otherwise afflicted in various ways.  They say that hardly a native child in all the East is free from sore eyes, and that thousands of them go blind of one eye or both every year.  I think this must be so, for I see plenty of blind people every day, and I do not remember seeing any children that hadn’t sore eyes.  And, would you suppose that an American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms, and let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes all that time undisturbed?  I see that every day.  It makes my flesh creep.  Yesterday we met a woman riding on a little jackass, and she had a little child in her arms —­honestly, I thought the child had goggles on as we approached, and I wondered how its mother could afford so much style.  But when we drew near, we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of flies assembled around each of the child’s eyes, and at the same time there was a detachment prospecting its nose.  The flies were happy, the child was contented, and so the mother did not interfere.

As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our party, they began to flock in from all quarters.  Dr. B., in the charity of his nature, had taken a child from a woman who sat near by, and put some sort of a wash upon its diseased eyes.  That woman went off and started the whole nation, and it was a sight to see them swarm!  The lame, the halt, the blind, the leprous—­all the distempers that are bred of indolence, dirt, and iniquity—­were represented in the Congress in ten minutes, and still they came!  Every woman that had a sick baby brought it along, and every woman that hadn’t, borrowed one.  What reverent and what worshiping looks