BEST PART OF THE INDIAN.



and chanting a low, mournful sound, slowly wound up
the hill on to the plateau, and in plain sight of the
whole camp, deposited in the ground the body of their
little darling, and then affectionately bending over the
wee mound, and leaving food for the nourishment of
the child on its journey, they kissed the soil, and
wended their way back again to their lonely lodge, to
no longer hear the patter of the little feet, or the music
of the little voice, or the clasp of the little hand, or the
touch of the little lip, but to feel an unutterable, incom-
prehensible void in the aching heart, as much so to the
Indian mother as to that of the white.
  A Mr. Farney, who has but recently returned from a
visit among the Sioux, says that he never saw a jollier
camp in his life than a Sioux village. The men sit in
their tepees and smoke, and talk over their battles, and
relate jokes that are received with unrestrained grunts
and gurgles of laughter. The squaws are soft-voiced
and graceful, and show a genuine mother love for their
children. He met a squaw when out on a sketching
tour with his Indian guide, who was running to fetch a
medicine man, thirty miles away, to cure her sick baby.
He told her to get into the wagon, and he would take
her as far on her way as he was going, and he says the
woman's grief was the most pathetic thing he ever saw.
Her face was covered close with her blanket, and she
sobbed and wept every moment of the way, nearly an
hour's ride. The Indian Rachel refusing to be com-
forted, and the dusky girls singing softly in the moon-
light, are what strike the artist's vision.
  The Sioux pluck out every vestige of eyebrows and
paint their faces a bright vermilion red and a ghastly
yellow; they move without a sound of their moccasin-



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