They have lived so near Manhattan, where refinement is so plenty, where the joy they jerk from barley--every other day but Sunday--gives the town a reddish color, that the Shinnecock is dying, dying with his cowhide boots on, dying with his hectic flush on, while the church bells chime in Brooklyn and New Yorkers go to Jersey, go to get their fire-water, go to get their red-eyed bug-juice, go to get their cooking whiskey. Far away at Minnehaha, in the land of the Dakota, where the cyclone feels so kinky, rising on its active hind-feet, with its tail up o'er the dash-board, blowing babies through the grindstone without injuring the babies, where the cyclone and the whopper journey on in joy together--there refinement and frumenti, with the new and automatic maladies and choice diseases that belong to the Caucasian, gather in the festive red man, take him to the reservation, rob him while his little life lasts, rob him till he turns his toes up, rob him till he kicks the bucket. And the Shinnecock is fading, he who greeted Chris. Columbus when he landed, tired and seasick, with a breath of peace and onions; he who welcomed other strangers, with their notions of refinement and their knowledge of the Scriptures and their fondness for Gambrinus--they have compassed his damnation and the Shinnecock is busted. WEBSTER AND HIS GREAT BOOK |NOAH Webster probably had the best command of language of any author of our time. Those who have read his great work entitled Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, or How One Word Led to Another, will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller. We were speaking of Mr. Webster on the way up here this afternoon, and a gentleman from Ashland told me of his death. Those of you who have read Mr. Webster's works will be pained to learn of this. One by one our eminent men are passing away. Mr. Webster has passed away; Napoleon Bonaparte is no more, and Dr. Mary Walker is fading away. This has been a severe winter on Sitting Bull, and I have to guard against the night air a good deal myself. It would ill become me at this late date to criticise Mr. Webster's work, a work that is now I may say in nearly every office, home, school-room and counting-room in the land. It is a great book. I only hope that had Mr. Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books. I hate to compare my books with Mr. Webster's, because it looks egotistical in me; but although Noah's book is larger than mine and has more literary attractions as a book to set a child on at the table, it does not hold the interest of the reader all the way through.