Once in a while I am obliged to stay over night in one of their houses in the winter, a thing I seldom do unless there is no white man’s house near; even in summer they are afraid the panthers will eat me up if I sleep outside; but between the fleas, rats and smoke (for they often keep the house full of smoke all night), sleep is not very refreshing, and the next morning I feel more like a piece of bacon than a minister. But Indian houses are not the only unpleasant ones. Here we are at a hotel, the best in a milling town of four or five hundred people; but the bar-room is filled with tobacco smoke almost as thick as the smoke from the fires which often fills an Indian house. Here about fifty men spend a great portion of the night (some of them all night) in drinking, gambling and smoking. The house is used to it, for the rooms directly over the bar-room are saturated with the smoke, and I am assigned to one of these rooms. Before I get to sleep the smoke has so filled my nostrils that I cannot breathe through them, and at midnight I wake up with a headache so severe that I can scarcely hold up my head for the next twenty-four hours. It is not so bad, however, but that I can do a little thinking on this wise: Who are the lowest, the Indians or these whites? The smoke in each of their houses is of about equal thickness; that of the Indians, however, is clean smoke from wood; that of the whites filthy from tobacco. The Indian has sense enough to make holes in the roof where some of it may escape; the white man does not even that much. The Indian sits or lies on or near the ground, beneath a great portion of it; the white man puts a portion of his guests and his ladies’ parlor in rooms directly over it. Sleeping in the Indian smoke, I come out well, though feeling like smoked bacon, and a thorough wash cures it; but sleeping in the white man’s smoke I come out sick, and the brain has to be washed.