CROCODILE ISLAND. 13 



Stomach. For five days and nights they sat unceasingly swallow- 

 ing the delicious fluid — five days and nights the calumet sent 

 forth its smoke — never for one moment being lifted from the lips, 

 save to make room for the cocoa-nut shell in which they drank 

 their casine. Sleep at last seemed to weigh heavily on the lids 

 of my royal father, — he was longer in the intervals of applying 

 the goblet to his mouth, — and at last his hand refused its office — 

 his head sank upon his shoulder; and his generous competitor, 

 satisfied with the victory he had gained, covered the imperial 

 person with a robe of leopard skin, and left him to his repose. 

 Repose ! — it was indeed his last repose — he opened his eyes but 

 once — groaned heavily — then shouting ' Give me casine in pail- 

 fuls,' — for the ruling passion was strong to the latest hour — he 

 became immoderately sick, and expired. I am afraid to state 

 how much had been drunk in this prodigious contest ; but it was 

 said by the court flatterers on the occasion, that they had consu- 

 med as much liquid as would have supplied a navigable canal 

 from lake Ouaquaphenogan to Talahasochte ! I was an orphan ; 

 and though the death of my father had now raised me to a throne, 

 I was bound by the customs of our nation to revenge it. In this 

 feeling I was bred ; I w^as allowed even from my infancy to drink 

 nothing weaker than casine ; my victuals were all seasoned with 

 the strongest rum, so that by the time I was sixteen years of age 

 my head was so accustomed to the influence of spirituous liquors, 

 that they were harmless to me as milk. Sisquo Dumfki was 

 still alive, and still remained the unrivalled hero of his tribe. His 

 death was decreed by my mother the very hour my father died ; 

 for this purpose she imbued my infant mind with unmitigated 

 hatred of the murderer, as she called him, of my father, and 

 taught me the happiness and glory of revenge. She talked to me 

 of attaining her object by tlie hatchet and tomahawk, doubting 

 perhaps that in spite of the training I had received, I should still 

 be vanquished by the superhuman capacity of the rat-catcher; 

 but I was confident in my own strength, and sending a trusty 

 messenger to the encampment of the Chicasaws, I invited him to 

 a solemn feast, and challenged him to a trial of strength. lie 

 came. You may imagine, sir, to yourself the feelings which agi- 

 tated my bosom, when, in my very presence, on the spot which 

 was the scene of his triumph, I saw the perpetrator of a father's 

 murder. Such, at least, was the light in which I had been 

 taught, since the hour T was first suspended on the aromatic 

 boughs of the magnolia, to regard the proud, the generous, the 



