There are Indians here: savage fellows;--one Black-Hawk and his friends, with naked shoulders and red blankets wrapped about their bodies:--the rest all grease and Spanish brown and vermillion. One carries a great war-club, and wears horns on his head; another had his face painted like a grid-iron, all in bands:--another is all red, like a lobster; and another black and blue, in great daubs of paint laid on not sparingly. Queer fellows!--One great champion of the _Fox_ nation had a short pipe in his mouth, smoking with great self-complacency as he marched out of the City Hall: another was smoking a cigar! Withal, they looked very formidable. Hard customers.... Very truly yours H. W. L.{45} Note, again, how this tendency to home themes asserts itself explicitly in Longfellow's notice of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" at about the same time in "The North American Review," (July, 1837):-- "One of the most prominent characteristics of these tales is, that they are national in their character. The author has wisely chosen his themes among the traditions of New England; the dusty legends of 'the good Old Colony times, when we lived under a king.' This is the right material for story. It seems as natural to make tales out of old tumble-down traditions, as canes and snuff-boxes out of old steeples, or trees planted by great men. The puritanical times begin to look romantic in the distance. Who would not like to have strolled through the city of Agamenticus, where a market was held every week, on Wednesday, and there were two annual fairs at St. James's and St. Paul's? Who would not like to have been present at the court of the Worshipful Thomas Gorges, in those palmy days of the law, when Tom Heard was fined five shillings for being drunk, and John Payne the same, 'for swearing one oath'? Who would not like to have seen the time, when Thomas Taylor was presented to the grand jury 'for abusing Captain Raynes, being in authority, by _thee-ing_ and _thou-ing_ him;' and John Wardell likewise, for denying Cambridge College to be an ordinance of God; and when some were fined for winking at comely damsels in church; and others for being common-sleepers there on the Lord's day? Truly, many quaint and quiet customs, many comic scenes and strange adventures, many wild and wondrous things, fit for humorous tale, and soft, pathetic story, lie all about us here in New England. There is no tradition of the Rhine nor of the Black Forest, which can compare in beauty with that of the Phantom Ship. The Flying Dutchman of the Cape, and the Klabotermann of the Baltic, are nowise superior. The story of Peter Rugg, the man who could not find Boston, is as good as that told by Gervase of Tilbury, of a man who gave himself to the devils by an unfortunate imprecation, and