I observed, after a while, that the same causes which had affected me were emaciating him, and he finally told me that he was talking his lungs out--and that he could not bear it much longer at the rate he was going on. The questions which were constantly put to him in the room were so much of a sort, or class, that there was little variety or novelty in them to please or excite him; almost every person putting the same; much the greater part of them being general, and therefore irksome to him, as they were often asked a hundred or more times in the day and as often answered. He came to me one evening, seemingly much relieved from the painful prospect he had been suffering under, and which was still before him, by the hope that I would adopt a plan he had hit upon for obviating much of the difficulty, and of saving his lungs for the explanations of questions which might be casual, and not exactly reduced to rule. He said he had ascertained that there were about 100 questions which were commonplace--were put (and in the same way precisely) by the greater part of people who came in, and had time to ask them; and that 50 of those, at least, were asked 100 times per day, the answering of which took the greater part of his time and the best part of his strength, which he thought might be reserved for giving more useful information, while these 100 questions, the most of which were extremely simple or silly, and of little importance to be known, might be disposed of by a printed table of answers placed around the rooms for every one to read as they walked, without the loss of time and fatigue consequent upon the usual mode of asking and answering questions. Though I could not consent to adopt his mode, yet I was amused at its ingenuity; and I give here but a small part of his list, which commenced and ran thus:-- "The Indians have _no beards at all_, only may be one in twenty or so." "The Indians _don't_ shave--they pull it out, when they have any beard." "Virtuous?--Yes. I should say they are quite as much so as the whites, if the whites would keep away from them and let them alone." "Ah, as amorous?--No. Mr. Catlin says they have not the spices of life and the imaginations to set them on, or I'll venture they would be quite as bad as the whites." "The Indians in _America are not_ cannibals. Mr. Catlin says there is no such thing." "No, there are no tribes that go entirely naked; they are all very decent." "The Indians _don't_ eat raw meat, they cook it more than the whites do." "Mr. Catlin was amongst the Indians eight years, and was never killed during that time." "The scalp is a patch of the skin and hair taken from the top of the head by a warrior when he kills his enemy in battle." "No, they don't scalp the living--it is not a scalp to count if the man is alive." "They _sometimes_ eat a great deal, to be sure, but generally not so much as white people."