Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/37

Rh of a vanished race come upon us with a depth of sympathy so true that we love to yield to it. When, under the fairer auspices of Nature, in our vacation or holiday moods, we visit spots in harmony with our ideals of the romance of savage life, we are easily beguiled into workings of remorse or pity for the wasted and extinct tribes who once roamed here before us. On the mountain slopes, with their deep, wild coverts, never yet disturbed by the woodman's axe, and where wild creatures still linger in their haunts, we feel that a few of the native stock might still find a refuge. In the shaded valleys, coursed by babbling brooks or rushing rivulets, on the green and pebbly shores of tranquil lakes, into which push out the sedgy and wooded tongues of land, circled with creeping vines and the mild fragrance of the wild-flowers, — we should meet without surprise the dusky loiterers whose moccasoned feet might tread noiselessly before us. By the summer seaside, on beach or cliff, where we pitch the canvas tent, in mimicry of the native wigwam, we may share in fancy the company of those to whom the scene on earth was the same three hundred years ago as it is to us to-day. Then, if ever, we are responsive to the feelings of compunction over the wrongs of the red men. We call them back as to their own outraged and stolen heritage. We reknit their untutored hearts to the scenes and objects which we feel they must have intensely enjoyed and loved, because they shared the human sensibilities which give to the sunlight and the breeze, to the lapping sea-wave and the aroma of the forest, their entrancing spell for us. The wealth of sentiment in them, unrefined and untutored as it was, was of the endowment of their nature. It must all have gone in concentrated, appreciative strength, to spend itself within the narrow range of their emotional being. Among the more engaging subjects of interest and curiosity which within quite recent years have been discussed by our more philosophic students, and which we shall have to note