with more readiness and perfection than any other.”[104] As to grammar, the jargon has no more than the inevitable rudiments involved in the necessity for expressing in some way ideas relating to time and number; and in these directions there is frequent resort to signs. But this, which accords with the first stage of picture-writing, is true of the speech of many Indian tribes. Their gesture-language is being reduced to the equivalent of a vocabulary, and is much more copious than that of the Oregon jargon. In 1880 the United States Bureau of Ethnology issued “A Collection of the gesture-signs and signals of the North American Indians”; and although this was only designed as a preliminary step towards the complete elucidation of the subject, it suffices to show how important a part signs and gestures play in the dialogue of many rude tribes. The Arapahoes, for example, according to Burton, “possess a very scanty vocabulary, and can hardly converse with one another in the dark. To make a stranger understand them they must always repair to the camp-fire for pow-wow.”[105] We are not without some due appreciation, even now, of the eloquence of action, as well as of speech, in the effective orator; and Charles Lamb, in one of the _Essays of Elia_, aptly reminds us how much even ordinary dialogue owes to expression for its full effect. Candle-light, “our peculiar and household planet,” is the theme of the quaint humorist. “Wanting it,” he says, “what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! . . . What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour’s cheek to be sure that he understood it?” And so the grave humorist goes on to picture the privations of a supper party in “those unlanterned nights.”