“One of the fellows, with one eye painted white, the other coal-black, was not ashamed to tell loudly, and with a beaming face, how he once fell upon a poor solitary Sioux girl and scalped her. He gave us the minutest details of this atrocity, and yet at the end of his harangue, he was applauded, or at least behowled, like the other orators. All the Indians stamped and uttered their war yell as a sign of applause, by holding their hands to their mouths trumpet fashion. At the moment the man appeared to me little less ferocious than a tiger, and yet when I formed his acquaintance at a latter date, he talked most reasonably and calmly like an honest farmer’s lad. Such are what are called the contradictions in human nature. “Very remarkable in all these harangues, was the unconcealed and vain self-laudation each employed about himself. Every speaker considered his deed the best and most useful for the whole nation. Each began by saying that what his predecessors had told them was very fine, but a trifle when compared with what he had to say about himself. It was his intention to astonish them once for all. His totem was the first in the whole land, and the greatest deeds had always been achieved by the spotted weasels (or as the case may be) and so he, the younger weasel, not wishing to be the inferior to his forefathers, had gone forth and performed deeds the description of which would make their hair stand on end,” etc. Among other tribes of North-American warriors, the braves were armed with small tomahawks, or iron hatchets, which they carried with the powder-horn in the belt on the right side, while the long tobacco pouch of antelope skin hung by the left side. Over their shoulders were leather targets, bows and arrows, and some few had rifles--both weapons were defended from damp in deer-skin cases--and quivers with the inevitable bead-work, and the fringes which every savage seems to love. Speaking of an army of Indian warriors “shifting camp,” Burton says, in his curious book “The City of the Saints”:--“Their nags were lean and ungroomed; they treat them as cruelly as do the Somal; yet nothing short of whiskey can persuade the Indian warrior to part with a favourite steed. It is his all in all,--his means of livelihood, his profession, his pride. He is an excellent judge of horse-flesh, though ignoring the mule and ass; and if he offers an animal for which he has once refused to trade, it is for the reason that an Oriental takes to market an adult slave--it has become useless. Like the Arab, he considers it dishonourable to sell a horse: he gives it to you, expecting a large present, and if disappointed he goes away grumbling that you have swallowed his property.