I have been assured by the Rev. James Doyle, who was a student of the Propaganda at the time, and who had frequent opportunities of witnessing Mezzofanti’s conversation with these youths, that his success was complete, at least so far as could be judged from external appearance—from his fluency, his facility of speech, and all the other outward indications of familiarity.[482] Some time before the arrival of these Californians, and soon after Mezzofanti’s coming to Rome, Bishop Fenwick, of Cincinnati, had sent for education to the Propaganda two North American Indians, youths of the Ottawa tribe, then residing near Mackinaw, at the upper end of Lake Michegan. The elder of these, named Augustine Hamelin, was a half-breed, being the son of a French father; the younger, whose Indian name was _Maccodobenesi_, (“the Blackbird,”) was of pure Ottawa blood.[483] Unhappily, as almost invariably happens in similar circumstances, the Indian, although a youth of much promise and very remarkable piety, pined away in the College, and eventually died from the bursting of a blood-vessel. Augustin Hamelin, the elder, spent a considerable time in the Propaganda, where he studied with great success, but in the end, being seized with blood-spitting, the authorities of the College, apprehensive of a recurrence of the same disease which had befallen Maccodobenesi, judged it more prudent to send him back to America. In consequence, he rejoined his tribe in the year 1835, or 1836. Mrs. Jameson, who in her “Rambles among the Red Men,” speaks of the Roman Catholic Ottawa converts in general, as “in appearance, dress, intelligence, industry, and general civilization, superior to the converts of all other communions,” refers in particular to “a well-looking young man, dressed in European fashion and in black, of mixed blood, French and Indian, who had been sent, when young, to be educated at the Propaganda, and was lately come to settle as a teacher and interpreter among his people.”[484] This youth, there can be no doubt, was Hamelin. Having come soon afterwards to Washington, as one of a deputation from his tribe to negociate a treaty with the United States Government, he produced a great sensation by his high education, his great general knowledge, and especially his skill in languages; and on a subsequent occasion, in 1840, Bishop O’Connor, of Pittsburgh, who had known him in the Propaganda, and to whom I am indebted for these particulars regarding him, encountered him in Philadelphia, engaged in a similar mission to the American Government. The well-known Indian philologer, M. du Ponceau, met him about the same time, and speaks with much praise of his intelligence and ability. It was from Hamelin that M. du Ponceau obtained the information regarding the Ottawa language which he has used in the comparative vocabulary of Indian languages, appended to his _Memoire sur le Systeme Grammaticale des Langues Indiennes_.[485]