It was late upon a fine glowing afternoon in July that we first crossed the Indian frontier, and issued from the forest upon a beautiful prairie, spreading out, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating carpet of green, enamelled with a thousand flowers, and lighted up by the golden rays of the setting sun. Occasionally a grouse, frightened at our approach, would bustle from among the high grass, and fly whirring over the tops of the neighbouring hills. We had ridden for more than an hour over the green waste. The heat of the afternoon was yielding to the cool breezes of sunset; the sun itself had just hid its crimson disk below the prairie hills, and the western sky was still glowing with its beams. The deer, which, during the scorching heat of mid-day, had nestled among the thick groves which dot the prairie, now began to steal from their hiding places, and were seen bounding over the green sward, or standing buried up to their heads among the tall flowers, and gazing wildly and fearfully at our party. At a distance, too, we could perceive the gaunt form of a vagabond wolf, sneaking through the grass, and stealing snake-like upon his beautiful, though timid, co-tenant of the prairie. An exclamation from our guide attracted our attention to a solitary Indian, mounted upon a horse, and standing, statue-like, upon a distant hill directly in our route. Although we had often seen straggling Indians in the frontier towns, they had in general so degraded an air as to attract but little attention. The appearance of this one, however, standing alone on his own soil, where he was bowed by no feeling of inferiority, must, we thought, be as noble as the soil of which he was the master; and we pushed forward to gaze upon him. He remained unmoved, neither advancing a single pace to meet us, nor retiring on our approach. He proved to be a Shawnee; one of the remnant of that brave tribe who, under Tecumseh, had made such a desperate attack upon the whites near the banks of the Wabash. Some years since, they had been removed from their old hunting grounds, and stationed about ten miles beyond the boundary which separates the state of Missouri from the territory bearing the same name. They had left the graves of their fathers, the home of their childhood, to seek in a strange land that freedom which they could no longer enjoy in the homestead handed down to them by their unfettered ancestors; but not before the sapping influence of their communion with the whites had exerted its sway over them, and reduced them to that abject state which distinguishes the civilised from the savage Indian.