"Be witness, thou great and beautiful luminary, of what we are this day going to do in the face of thy orb! If thou didst disapprove us, thou wouldst, this moment, hide thyself, to avoid affording the light of thy rays to all the actions of this assembly. Thou didst exist of old, and still existeth. Thou remainest for ever as beautiful, as radiant, and as beneficent, as when our first fore fathers beheld thee. Thou wilt always be the same. The father of the day can never fail us, he who makes every thing vegetate, and without whom cold, darkness, and horror, would every where prevail. Thou knowest all the iniquitous procedure of our enemies towards us. What perfidy have they not used, what deceit have they not employed, whilst we had no room to distrust them? There are now more than five, six, seven, eight moons revolved since we left the principal amongst our daughters with them, in order thereby to form the most durable alliance with them, (for, in short, we and they are the same thing as to our being, constitution, and blood); and yet we have seen them look on these girls of the most distinguished rank, _Kayheepidetchque_, as mere playthings for them, an amusement, a pastime put by us into their hands, to afford them a quick and easy consolation, for the fatal blows we had given them in the preceding war. Yet, we had made them sensible, that this supply of our principal maidens was, in order that they should re-people their country more honorably, and to put them under a necessity of conviction, that we were now become sincerely their friends, by delivering to them so sacred a pledge of amity, as our principal blood. Can we then, unmoved, behold them so basely abusing that thorough confidence of ours? Beautiful, all-seeing, all-penetrating luminary! without whose influence the mind of man has neither efficacy nor vigor, thou hast seen to what a pitch that nation (who are however our brothers) has carried its insolence towards our principal maidens. Our resentment would not have been so extreme with respect to girls of more common birth, and the rank of whose fathers had not a right to make such an impression on us. But here we are wounded in a point there is no passing over in silence or unrevenged. Beautiful luminary! who art thyself so regular in thy course, and in the wise distribution thou makest of thy light from morning to evening, wouldst thou have us not imitate thee? And whom can we better imitate? The earth stands in need of thy governing thyself as thou dost towards it. There are certain places, where thy influence does not suffer itself to be felt, because thou dost not judge them worthy of it. But, as for us, it is plain that we are thy children; for we can know no origin but that which thy rays have given us, when first marrying efficaciously, with the earth we inhabit, they impregnated its womb, and caused us to grow out of it like the herbs of the field, and the trees of the forest, of