For this purpose, they artfully lay hold of all that is strange and mysterious, and if possible turn it to their own advantage. To do this is the one object and effort of their lives. It is their study day and night, at all times and on all occasions. They think about it when awake, and dream about it when asleep. They make use of all the means in their power, and their zeal never grows cold. They assume familiarity with whatever astonishes other people, with a degree of self complacency, and an air of impudence and assurance which strikes the observers with amazement. They foretell future events with a degree of accuracy or of ambiguity which is sufficient for their purpose. Those at one village affect to be familiar with what is transpiring at another village leagues distant They predict the result of a war expedition as if they had already been there; and if the prediction is not fulfilled they find no difficulty in setting the failure to the account of the sins of their followers. They inflict diseases and heal them. They kill and make alive. When occasion requires they seem to calm the tempest, or to raise the storm, and converse with thunder and lightning, as with a familiar friend and equal. In their devotional exercises, at times, they wrangle with the gods, charge them with duplicity, and are defiant. If one of them is killed by the electric fluid, which sometimes happens, it only proves the truth, to the living, of all he had taught them concerning the Wakinyan, and that he had provoked their anger by his sins. The medicine man is not only familiar with the superior gods who are out of him, but he also has inferior gods dwelling in him, to satisfy whose cravings he frequently, and in the most public manner, tears off with his teeth and eats the raw, quivering, bleeding flesh of newly-slaughtered animals, like a starving beast or bird of prey, devouring parts of dogs or fish entire, not excepting bones and scales. RAW FISH FEAST. In the summer of 1852, a feast of this kind was observed at Shakopee. It was made by _Anoginajin_, second chief of the Little Six band and others.