But distinguished as Tecumseh was for his deeds as a warrior, we have ever regarded him as still more conspicuous, from the convincing proofs he has left, that he was an orator, in the highest sense of the term. That he was fearless, see his declarations in council, when surrounded by his enemies. What apophthegm, though uttered in Rome, in her happiest days, surpasses his reply to the interpreter, when, fatigued from speaking in council, at Vincennes, he saw that no chair had been provided for him. “Your father,” (alluding to General Harrison,) said the interpreter, “requests you to take a chair,”—at the same moment handing one. “My father!”—replied Tecumseh, “the sun is my father, the earth my mother; upon her bosom I will repose;”—and, suiting the action to his words, he laid himself on the ground. What more striking than his reply to General Harrison, when discussing in his own tent, the probability of war. Alluding to the situation which the President of the United States would occupy in such an event, he replied,—“True, he is so far off, that the war will not injure him; he may sit still in his town, and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out;” or the words of Tecumseh, when, in one of his speeches, alluding to the earthquake which overwhelmed New Madrid, he says:—“The Great Spirit is angry with our enemies; he speaks in thunder, and the earth swallows up villages, and drinks up the Mississippi; the wide waters will cover their low lands, and the Great Spirit will sweep from the earth, with his terrible breath, those who escape to the hills.” Of all his speeches which have been preserved, the one which we here extract, gives perhaps the best idea of his manner and mode of expression. In judging of it, as of all other Indian productions, we should make allowance for the loss they must necessarily sustain in being translated, and secondly, for the fact that, as a general remark, all the persons who have been employed as interpreters among them, have generally been uneducated men. Tecumseh, being at Malden, with General Proctor, when the latter began to make preparations for retreating, in consequence of Perry's victory, and not knowing why he was hurrying away, demanded a council in the name of all the Indians, and spoke as follows:— “Father—Listen to your children! You have them all now before you. “The war before this, our British father gave the hatchet to his red children, when our old chiefs were alive. They are now dead! In the war, our father was thrown on his back, by the Americans, and our father took them by the hand without our knowledge. We are afraid our father will do so again at this time. “Summer before last, when I came forward with my red brethren, and was ready to take up the hatchet in favour of our British father, we were told not to be in a hurry, that he had not yet determined to fight the Americans.