"When we had called at Mr. Renville's, which was a little beyond, we returned through the heart of the village, attended by such a retinue as I have never before seen, and such strange intermingling of laughing and shouting of children and barking of dogs as I never heard. Amazed, and almost deafened by the clamor, I turned to gaze upon the unique group. Some of the older girls were close upon our heels, but as we stopped they also halted, and those behind slackened their pace. Boys and girls of from four to twelve years of age, some wrapped in their blankets, more without, and quite a number of boys almost or entirely destitute of clothing, with a large number of dogs of various sizes and colors, presented themselves in an irregular line. As all of the Indians here have pitched their lodges together, I suppose there might have been thirty or forty children in our train. When we reached home, I found little Alfred happy and quiet, in the same place on the bed I had left him more than two hours previous, his father having been busy studying Dakota. "This evening two Indian women came and sat a little while in our happy home. One of them had a babe about the age of Alfred. You would have smiled to see the plump, undressed child peeping out from its warm blanket like a little unfledged bird from its mossy nest." Mr. Pond had long been yearning to see inside of an Indian. He had been wanting to be an Indian, if only for half an hour, that he might know how an Indian felt and by what motives he could be moved. And so when the early spring of 1838 came, and the ducks began to come northward, a half-dozen families started out from Lac-qui-parle to hunt and trap on the upper part of the Chippewa River, in the neighborhood of where is now the town of Benson, in Minnesota. Mr. Pond went with them, and was gone two weeks. It was in the first of April, and the streams were flooded, and the water was cold. There should have been enough of game easily obtained to feed the party well. So the Indians thought. But it did not prove so. A cold spell came on, the ducks disappeared, and Mr. Pond and his Indian hunters were reduced to scanty fare, and sometimes to nothing, for a whole day. But Mr. Pond was seeing inside of Indians, and was quite willing to starve a good deal in the process. However, his stay with them, and their hunt for that time as well, was suddenly terminated.