The red men treated him, as the friend and guest of their chief, with marked distinction, making him quickly feel himself at home. He adapted himself to their habits, dressed in their costume, and, as far as he could, took part in all their doings, their smokes, their dances, their hunts, their songs. Their rude customs were not offensive but rather attractive to him, and he was happy, feeling that it would not be hard for him to relapse from civilization and stay permanently with these wild stepchildren of nature. He seemed to come into contact with the unwritten traditions of the prehistoric time, and to taste the simple freedom that prevailed before so many artificial luxuries, toils, and laws had made such slaves of us all. The fine chance here offered him of getting an accurate knowledge of the American Indian, alike in his exterior and his interior personality, he carefully improved, and when he came to enact the part of Metamora it stood him in good stead. One night Push-ma-ta-ha and Forrest were lying on the ground before a big fire which they had kindled a little way out from the village. They had been conversing for hours, recalling stories and legends for their mutual entertainment. The shadows of the wood lay here and there like so many dark ghosts of trees prostrate and intangible on the earth. The pale smoke from their burning heap of brush floated towards heaven in spectral volumes and slowly faded out afar. In the unapproachable blue over their heads hung the full moon, and in the pauses of their talk nothing but the lonely notes of a night-bird broke the silence. Like an artist, or like an antique Greek, Forrest had a keen delight in the naked form of man, feeling that the best image of God we have is nude humanity in its perfection, which our fashionable dresses so travesty and degrade. Push-ma-ta-ha, then twenty-four years old, brought up from his birth in the open air and in almost incessant action of sport and command, was from head to foot a faultless model of a human being. Forrest asked him to strip himself and walk to and fro before him between the moonlight and the firelight, that he might feast his eyes and his soul on so complete a physical type of what man should be. The young chief, without a word, cast aside his Choctaw garb and stepped forth with dainty tread, a living statue of Apollo in glowing bronze. "Push-ma-ta-ha," said Forrest, in wondering admiration, "who were your grandparents?" His nostrils curled with a superbly beautiful disdain, and, stretching forth his arm with a lofty grace which the proudest Roman orator could not have surpassed, he replied, "My father was never born. The Great Spirit shivered an oak with one of his thunderbolts, and my father came out, a perfect man, with his bow and arrows in his hand!"