Blankets, often very wet, have been thrown over the Indian; while as often he has been painted so thickly, and feathered so profusely, as to become a bird of quite another color from that of our North American vulture. Slow in learning the geography of the race that rides him down as on a pale horse evermore, he has acquired the name of but one of our streams, that of the Firewater, a river whose dry banks seem always to divide his retreating from our pursuing frontier boundaries. Perhaps we cannot give a more variegated notion of the different aspects under which the Indian character is viewed, than by putting it in an American kaleidoscope, and there giving it a few turns, certain that these turns will not be more curious or numerous than their owners’ fortunes. 1. _The Indian character as viewed in schools and colleges._ Listen to an average specimen from the pen of Miss Jemima Letitia Youngfancy,—her most pronounced effort before the trustees and patrons of Rising Hill Seminary. “‘Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.’ LAMENTATIONS or SHAKESPEARE. “No subject is of greater importance to the well-being of our race than a proper estimate of the character of the red man. Injustice here is more deplorable, since it involves the historic position of a race once lords of all this continent, now fast dwindling away, not only out of physical existence, but from the realms of discriminating praise. His has been the misfortune to be despoiled, not simply of the bosky inheritance of fair fields and boundless domains, where his ancestors roamed as free as the winds that sweep over the breezy sierras of the Rocky Mountains, but of the justice which pleads before the tribunal of posterity for rights withheld and wrongs inflicted. Not content to pursue his retreating and emaciated footsteps into the tomb, where his poor body is scarcely allowed to moulder away in peace, amid the implements and trophies of the chase, the white man, as voracious as the prairie wolves, which whet their sharp fangs against the rocky bases that prop up the giant Cordilleras of our beloved land, has denied to him those monumental rights with which even savages adorn the last resting-places of their braves,—the trophied inscriptions carved in the enduring language in which Virgil sang and Tully burned, and in which Menander, prophetic of our Transatlantic greatness, babbled to the dull ears of a Roman race, which recked not of that ‘proud stoic of the woods,’ who, in life a victim of wrong, at death folds himself to his solemn sleep, in the language of the greatest of our living poets, ‘Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams,’ but who, also, in the apt words of the same rapt minstrel, ‘Like Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,— The eternal years of God are theirs.’”