"But sermon is done. There is another loud-voiced hymn, and then the meeting of days is declared duly opened. It is to be a composite, a session of Presbytery, for they happen to have taken that form, and a Conference of churches. A leading candidate for moderator is Ehnamane, a Santee pastor. How far the fact that he is a great hunter and a famous paddleman affects the vote we can not say. This may have had more weight: his father was a great conjurer and war prophet. Before he died he said to his son:-- "'The white man is coming into the country, and your children may learn to read. But promise me that you will never leave the religion of your ancestors.' "He promised. And he says now that had the Minnesota outbreak not come, in which his gods were worsted by the white man's God, he would have kept true to his pledge. As it is, he now preaches the faith which once he destroyed, and they make him moderator. "We will not follow the meeting throughout the days. There are resolutions and motions to amend and all that, just like white folks, and plenty of speech-making. Now a telling hit sends a ripple of laughter through the room; and now the moistened eyes and trembling lip tell that some deep vein of feeling has been touched. Grave questions are under discussion: _Pastoral Support_, opening out into general benevolence; _Pastoral Visitation_, its necessity, methods, difficulties, and also as a work pertaining to elders, deacons, and to the whole membership; _Primary Education_--shall it be in the vernacular or in English? a most spirited debate, resulting in this: '_Resolved_, That so long as the children speak the Dakota at home, education should be _begun_ in the Dakota.' Then the _Iapi Oaye_, the _Word Carrier_--for they have their newspaper, and it has its financial troubles--comes up. All rally to its support. But the hundred-dollar deficit for last year, _that_, we suspect, comes out of the missionaries' meagre salaries. All along certain more strictly ecclesiastical matters are mingled in. James Red-Wing is brought forward to be approbated as a preacher at Fort Sully. An application is considered for forming a new church on the Sisseton reserve. The church at White Banks asks aid for a church building, and a Yankton elder is examined and received as a candidate for the ministry. The Indians, in large numbers, share freely in all these deliberations. Everything is decorous and dignified, sometimes evidently intensely interesting, we the while burning to know what they are saying, and getting the general drift only through a friendly whisper in the ear. While they are discussing, we will make a few notes: about one-third of these before us were imprisoned for the massacre of 1862, although, probably, none of them took active part in it. The larger portion of them were made freemen of the Lord in that great prison revival at Mankato, as a result of which 300 joined the church in one day. They