Being thirsty, the Indian, seeing a cooler of ice-water, with the daring peculiar to a great brave, went and took a glass and turned on the _spicket_. He filled his glass--it was brim-full--but he did not know how to _turn it off_. Then I had him. As it ran over he turned to me an appealing helpless glance. I said "_Neosho_." This in Pottawattamie means an inundation or overflowing of the banks, and is generally applied to the inundation of the Mississippi. There is a town on the latter so called. This was too much for the Indian, and he laughed aloud. "Great God! what have you been saying to that Indian?" cried the agent, amazed. "It is the first time he has laughed since he left home." "Only a little pun in Pottawattamie. But I really know very little of the language." "I have no knowledge of the Indian languages," remarked our city editor, MacGinnis, a genial young Irishman, "least of all, thank God! of Pottawattamie. But I have always understood that when a man gets so far in a tongue as to make _puns_ in it, it is time for him to stop." Years after this I was one evening in London at an opening of an exhibition of pictures. There were present Indian Hindoo princes in gorgeous array, English nobility, literary men, and fine ladies. Among them was an unmistakable Chippeway in a white Canadian blanket-coat, every inch an Indian. I began with the usual greeting, "_Ho nitchi_!" (Ho, brother!), to which he gravely replied. I tried two or three phrases on him with the same effect. Then I played a sure card. Sinking my voice with an inviting wink, I uttered "_Shingawauba_," or whisky. "Dot fetched him." He too laughed. _Gleich mit gleich_, _gesellt sich gern_. While living in New York, and during my connection with the _Press_, I often met and sometimes conversed with Horace Greeley. Once I went with him from Philadelphia to New York, and he was in the car the observed of all observers to an extraordinary degree. He sat down, took out an immense roll of proof, and said, "_Lead pencil_!" One was immediately handed to him by some stranger, who was by that one act ennobled, or, what amounts to the same thing in America, grotesquely _charactered_ for life. He was the man who gave Horace Greeley a lead pencil! I, as his companion, was also regarded as above ordinary humanity. When the proof was finished "Horace" said to me-- "How is John Forney getting on?" "Like Satan, walking to and fro upon the face of the earth, going from the _Chronicle_ in Washington one day to the _Press_ in Philadelphia on the next, and filling them both cram full of leaders and letters." "Two papers, both daily! I tell Forney that I find it is all I can do to attend to one. Tell him not to get too rich--bad for the constitution and worse for the country. Any man who has more than a million is a public nuisance."