Each dance seemed to have a special form and significance;--one in particular, where the dancers unstacked the tall canes with feathers suspended from them, each taking one from the mast sustaining it; and this one, I was told, meant to immortalize triumphs won at ball-plays. The feathered canes are seized as markers of points gained by the bearers in the ball-play, which is the main trial of strength and skill among rival clans of the same tribe, in friendship, and even between tribe and tribe, when in harmony. The effect of these canes and feathers, as they glanced around, with an exulting chorus, was very inspiriting, and the celebrants became almost wild with their delight as it drew near its climax, ending their closing whoop with a general laugh of triumphant recollection. Other dances were represented as alluding to conquests over bears and panthers, and even the buffalo, which last memorial is remarkable enough, having among them survived all traces of the buffalo itself. But, excepting these vague hints, I could not find any bystander capable of giving me a further explanation of any point on which I inquired, than that it was 'an old custom;' or, if they wished to be more explicit, with a self-satisfied air, they would gravely remark that it was 'the green-corn dance,'--which I knew as well as they. Could I have been instructed even in their phrases and speeches, I might have made valuable conjectures. But even their language, on these occasions, seems, by their own admission, beyond the learning of the '_linkisters_.' It is a poetical, mystical idiom, varying essentially from that of trading and of familiar intercommunication, and utterly incomprehensible to the literal minds of mere trafficking explainers. Even were it otherwise, the persons hovering upon the frontier most ingenuously own, when pressed for interpretations of Indian customs, that they care nothing for the Indians excepting to get their lands, and that they really consider all study concerning them as egregious folly, save only that of finding out how much cotton their grounds will yield, and in what way the greatest speculations can be accomplished with the smallest capital. The last of the ceremonies of the day consisted of a sort of trial of fortitude upon the young.