Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/292

Rh or acuteness, but it is deficient in feeling. There is an immense difference between their eyes and those of the negroes. The former are a cold day, the latter a warm night.

Last night we passed through Lake Pepin in the moonlight. It is an extension of the Mississippi, large enough to constitute a lake, surrounded by magnificent hills which seem to enclose it with their almost perpendicular cliffs, one among which is particularly prominent, and is called Wenonas cliff, from a young Indian girl who here sang her death-song and then threw herself into the waters below, preferring death to marriage with a young man whom she did not love.

Late last evening I noticed a tall Indian who was standing with his arms crossed, wrapped in his blanket, under a large tree. He stood as immovable as if he had grown into the tree against the bole of which he leaned. He looked very stately. All at once he gave a leap forward and uttering a shrill cry bounded down to the shore; and then I saw, at no great distance, an encampment of about twenty huts in the forest near the river, where fires were burning, and there seemed to be a throng of people. Along the shore lay a considerable number of small canoes, and I imagined that the warning cry of the man had reference to these, for when our steamer swung past the place, for it was at a bend of the river where the camp stood, it occasioned a sort of earthquake to those little boats which were hurled like nut-shells one against another, and on toward the shore. The people who were seated in the boats, leapt upon the shore, others came running from the huts down to the boats; the whole encampment was in motion, there was a yelling and a barking both of men and dogs, and shrill cries which were heard long after Menomonie had shot past on her foaming career. The camp with its fires, its huts, and its people, was a most wild and animated scene.

At another place, during the day, we saw a large, pale