It is not difficult to suppose that the minds of these unfortunate children were temporarily deranged by the sustained fasts they had been forced to undertake. Picture-Writing Most of the tribes of North America had evolved a rude system of picture-writing. This consisted, for the most part, of figures of natural objects connected by symbols having arbitrary or fixed meanings. Thus the system was both ideographic and pictographic; that is, it represented to some extent abstract ideas as well as concrete objects. These scripts possessed so many arbitrary characters, and again so many symbols which possessed different meanings under varying circumstances, that to interpret them is a task of the greatest complexity. They were usually employed in the compilation of the seasonal calendars, and {77} sometimes the records of the tribe were preserved by their means. [Illustration: Indian Picture Writing: A Petroglyph in Nebraska. By permission of the Bureau of American Ethnology] Perhaps the best known specimen of Indian script is the Dakota 'Lone-dog Winter-count,' supposed to have been painted originally on a buffalo-robe. It is said to be a chronicle covering a period of seventy-one years from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Similar chronicles are the _Wallum-Olum_, which are painted records of the Leni-Lenâpé, an Algonquian people, and the calendar history of the Kiowa. The former consists of several series, one of which records the doings of the tribes down to the time of the arrival of the European colonists at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We append an extract from the _Wallum-Olum_ as a specimen of genuine aboriginal composition. The translation is that made by the late Professor Brinton. After the rushing waters had subsided, the Lenâpé of the Turtle were close together, in hollow houses, living together there. It freezes where they abode: it snows where they abode: it storms where they abode: it is cold where they abode. At this northern place, they speak favourably of mild, cool lands, with many deer and buffaloes. As they journeyed, some being strong, some rich, they separated into house-builders and hunters: The strongest, the most united, the purest were the hunters. The hunters showed themselves at the north, at the east, at the south, at the west. In that ancient country, in that northern country, in that Turtle country, the best of Lenâpé were the Turtle-men. [That is, probably, men of the Turtle totem.] All the cabin fires of that land were disquieted, and all said to their priest: "Let us go." {78} To the Snake land, to the east, they went forth, going away, earnestly grieving. Split asunder, weak, trembling, their land burned: they went, torn and broken, to the Snake Island. Those from the north being free, without care, went forth from the land of snow, in different directions. The fathers of the Bald Eagle and the White Wolf remain along the sea, rich in fish and strength.