Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/80

66 is often satisfied if he only gets to the post office in the course of the day. The arctic voyagers are obliged to invent and willfully engage in active amusements to keep themselves awake and alive. Even our experience is something like wintering in the pack.

Dec. 30, 1856. What an evidence it is, after all, of civilization, or of a capacity for improvement, that savages like our Indians, who, in their protracted wars, stealthily slay men, women, and children without mercy, with intense pleasure, who delight to burn, torture, and devour one another, proving themselves more inhuman in these respects even than beasts, what a wonderful evidence it is, I say, of their capacity for improvement, that even they can enter into the most formal compact or treaty of peace, burying the hatchet, etc., and treating with each other with as much consideration as the most enlightened states. You would say that they had a genius for diplomacy as well as for war.—Consider that Iroquois, torturing his captive, roasting him before a slow fire, biting off the fingers of him alive, and finally eating the heart of him dead, betraying not the slightest evidence of humanity, and now behold him in the council chamber where he meets the representatives of the hostile nation to treat of peace, conducting with such perfect dignity and decorum, betraying