The wealthy virgins of Greece and Rome were present with fruits in golden baskets at Bacchanalian revels, but they have never been held up as monsters, while our school-books have teemed with amours of gods and goddesses, such as find no place on the darkest pages of Indian lore. We listen to the story of the woman in the moon, who is constantly employed in weaving a net, which a cat ravels whenever she sleeps, and that the world is to come to an end when the net is finished, and call it ridiculous. While the story of Penelope weaving her purple web by day to be unraveled by night, and thus prolong the absence of her husband Ulysses, who went to the siege of Troy, is a conception worthy of being expanded into a poem of a thousand lines, and translated into all languages. The Indian had no Cupids, or their representatives, to attend the affairs of the heart, but he had charms which obtained the love of any fair maiden whom he desired, and charms which secured him the love of his wife during his long absence on the war-path and hunting excursions, and made every thing that he could do bright and beautiful in her eyes. And they had no Bacchus to preside at drunken revels, for they “did not tarry long at the wine, or look upon it when it was red.” But they had spirits to preside at the pure fountain, where alone they went to slake their thirst. Human sacrifices were offered annually among the Aztecs, but never among the Iroquois. But even these were not entirely the result of Indian barbarity. “Human sacrifices have been practised by many nations, not excepting the most polished nations of antiquity.” “They were of frequent occurrence among the Greeks, as every school-boy knows, and in Egypt. In Rome they were so common as to require to be interdicted by an express law, less than a hundred years before the Christian Era,—a law recorded in a very honest strain of exultation by Pliny, notwithstanding which, traces of the existence of the practice may be discerned to a much later period.” [7] Zurita was an eminent jurist from Spain, who resided nineteen years among the Aztecs, and is indignant that they should be called barbarians, saying, “It is an epithet which could come from no one who had personal knowledge of the capacity of the people or their institutions, and which in some respects is quite as well merited by Europeans.” If the Aztecs did not deserve the term barbarians, surely I shall be thought just in denying the term savage to belong to the Iroquois; and from their mythology, if nothing else, it is evident that they were destitute neither of genius nor of poetry. They were heathen and Pagans, but not savages, and before we boast that we have attained unto perfection, let us remember that Spiritualists and Mormons have arisen in the nineteenth century, and multitudes have wended their way to Salt Lake City, who were trained in the churches of New England! CHAPTER IV. CUSTOMS AND INDIVIDUAL TRAITS OF CHARACTER.