Page:Letters from America, Brooke, 1916.djvu/193

Rh I suppose one is apt to be sentimental about these good people. They're really so picturesque; they trail clouds of Fenimore Cooper; and they seem, for all their unfitness, reposefully more in touch with permanent things than the America that has succeeded them. And it is interesting to watch our pathetic efforts to prevent or disarm the effects of ourselves. What will happen? Shall we preserve these few bands of them, untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when the grasp of our 'civilisation' weakens, and our transient anarchy in these wilder lands recedes once more before the older anarchy of Nature? Or will they be entirely swallowed by that ugliness of shops and trousers with which we enchain the earth, and become a memory and less than a memory? They are that already. The Indians have passed. They left no arts, no tradition, no buildings or roads or laws; only a story or two, and a few names, strange and beautiful. The ghosts of the old chiefs must surely chuckle when they note that the name by which Canada has called her capital and the centre of her political life, Ottawa, is an Indian name which signifies 'buying and selling.' And the wanderer in this land will always