and the deepest interest excited. All is ease and freedom from restraint. There is nothing of the coldness or severe formality of the council. The pipe is put to its ordinary use, and all its symbolic sanctity is laid aside with the wampum belt and the often reiterated state epithets, "Nosa" and "Kosinan," i. e. _my father_ and _our father_. Another striking trait of the race is found in their legends and tales. Those of the aboriginal race who excel in private conversation, become to their tribes oral chroniclers, and are relied on for historical traditions as well as tales. It is necessary, in listening to them, to distinguish between the gossip and the historian, the narrator of real events, and of nursery tales. For they gather together everything from the fabulous feats of Manebozho and Misshozha, to the hair-breadth escapes of a Pontiac, or a Black Hawk. These narrators are generally men of a good memory and a certain degree of humor, who have experienced vicissitudes, and are cast into the vale of years. In the rehearsal of their tales, transformations and transmigrations are a part of the machinery relied on; and some of them are as accurately adapted to the purposes of amusement or instruction, as if Zoroaster or Ovid himself had been consulted in their production. Many objects in the inanimate creation, according to these tales, were originally men and women. And numerous animals had other forms in their first stages of existence, which they, as well as human beings, forfeited, by the power of necromancy and transmigration. The evening star, it is fabled, was formerly a woman. An ambitious boy became one of the planets. Three brothers, travelling in a canoe, were translated into a group of stars. The fox, lynx, hare, robin, eagle and numerous other species, retain places in the Indian system of astronomy. The mouse obtained celestial elevation by creeping up the rainbow, which Indian story makes a flossy mass of bright threads, and by the power of gnawing them, he relieved a captive in the sky. It is a coincidence, which we note, that _ursa major_ is called by them the bear. These legends are not confined to the sky alone. The earth also is a fruitful theatre of transformations. The wolf was formerly a boy, who, being neglected by his parents, was transformed into this animal. A shell, lying on the shore, was transformed to the raccoon. The brains of an adulteress were converted into the _addikumaig_, or white fish.