Page:The Columbia river , or, Scenes and adventures during a residence of six years on the western side of the Rocky Mountains among various tribes of Indians hitherto unknown (Volume 1).djvu/340

 to dance, beg, and play many tricks, which delighted the Indians exceedingly.

While we were here a curious incident occurred between Mr. M'Donald and an Indian, which I shall preface by a short account of the former. He belonged to a highly respectable family which emigrated from Inverness-shire to Canada while he was a lad. His first accents were lisped in Gaelic; but in the capital of the Highlands, so celebrated for its pure English, he made considerable progress in our language. On arriving in Canada he was obliged to learn French, in which he had made some proficiency, when he joined the North-west Company as an apprentice-clerk. At the period I speak of he had been ten years absent from Canada, and had travelled over an immense extent of Indian country. He seldom remained more than one winter at any particular place, and had a greater facility of acquiring than of retaining the language of the various tribes with whom he came in contact. He was subject to temporary fits of abstraction, during which the country of his auditory was forgotten, and their lingual knowledge set at defiance by the most strange and ludicrous mélange of Gaelic, English, French, and half a dozen Indian dialects. Whenever any thing occurred