It was a great gratification to me to have seen this festival; with my own eyes to have witnessed the Indians in their own nation, with my own ears to have heard them in their own language. Nor was it any diminution of the interest of the spectacle to reflect that this ceremony, so precious to them, was now probably performing in the land of their forefathers for the last, last time. I never beheld more intense devotion; and the spirit of the forms was a right and a religious one. It was beginning the year with fasting, with humility, with purification, with prayer, with gratitude. It was burying animosities, while it was strengthening courage. It was pausing to give thanks to Heaven, before daring to partake its beneficence. It was strange to see this, too, in the midst of my own land; to travel, in the course of a regular journey in the New World, among the living evidences of one, it may be, older than what we call the Old World;--the religion, and the people, and the associations of the untraceable past, in the very heart of the most recent portion of the most recent people upon earth. And it was a melancholy reflection for ourselves, that, comparing the majority of the white and red assemblage there, the barbarian should be so infinitely the more civilized and the more interesting of the two. ROSIN THE BOW. A FANTASIA. In Paris, a famous city in France, That lies by the banks of the sluggish Seine, Where you and I may never have been, But which we know all about in advance;-- A place of wild and wicked romance, A place where they gamble, and fiddle and dance, And the slowest coach has always a chance To get put over the road, I ween, Where women are naughty, and men are gay, And the suicides number a dozen a day, And one of the gallant _jeunesse doree_ Will spend the night at prodigious play, And in the morning go out and slay His bosom friend with a rapier keen, Because he loses and cannot pay,-- Lived a nice young man named DIDIER. This nice young man had run aground, As such young men are apt to do; His creditors swore and his mistress frowned, His breeches pockets held ne'er a _sou_, His boots were getting out at the toes, His hat was seedy, and so were his clothes, And, as he wandered the city around, He could not think of a single friend Slow to dun and prompt to lend, Whose purse he thought he could venture to sound; In such extremities friends are few; At least I think so, friend, don't you?