Scarcely less mysterious--though living among us still--are the red men whom we found here. They had no written languages or history; their knowledge of their own past was confined to vague and fanciful traditions. They were few in numbers, barbarous in condition, untamable in nature; they built no cities and practiced no industries: their women planted maize and performed all menial labors; their men hunted and fought. Before we came, they fought one another; our coming did not unite them against a common enemy; it only gave each of them one enemy the more. After an intercourse of four hundred years, we know as little of them as we did at first; we have neither educated, absorbed nor exterminated them. The fashion of their faces, and some other indications, seem to point to a northern Asiatic ancestry; but they cannot tell us even so much as we can guess. There have been among them, now and again, men of commanding abilities in war and negotiation; but their influence upon their people has not lasted beyond their own lives. Amid the roar and fever of these latter ages, they stand silent, useless, and apathetic. They belong to our history only in so far as their savage and treacherous hostility contributed to harden the fortitude of our earlier settlers, and to weld them into a united people. Posterity may resolve these obscurities; meanwhile they remain in picturesque contrast to the merciless publicity of our own life, and the scientific annihilation of time and distance. They are as the dark and amorphous loam in which has taken root the Flower of the Ages. If extremes must meet, it was fitting that the least and the most highly developed examples of mankind should dwell side by side, at the close of the nineteenth century, in a land to which neither is native: that Europe, the child of Asia, should meet its prehistoric parent here, and work out its destiny before her uncomprehending eyes. The world is an inn of strange meetings; and this encounter is perhaps the strangest of all.