Ixxxiv INTRODUCTION. 



felted madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned 

 loose. Each pretended to have dreamed of something 

 necessary to his welfare, and rushed from house to house, 

 demanding of all he met to guess his secret requirement 

 and satisfy it. 



Believing that the wliole material world was instinct 

 with powers to influence and control his fate, that good 

 and evil spirits, and existences nameless and indefinable, 

 filled all Nature, that a pervading sorcery was above, 

 below, and around him, and that issues of life and death 

 might be controlled by instruments the most unnoticeable 

 and seemingly the most feeble, the Indian lived in per- 

 petual fear. The turning of a leaf, the crawling of an 

 insect, the cry of a bird, the creaking of a bough, might 

 be to him the mystic signal of weal or woe. 



An Indian community swarmed with sorcerers, med- 

 icine-men, and diviners, whose functions were often 

 united in the same person. The sorcerer, by charms, 

 magic songs, magic feasts, and the beating of his drum, 

 had power over the spirits and those occult influences 

 inherent in animals and inanimate things. He could call 

 to him the souls of his enemies. They appeared before 

 him in the form of stones. He chopped and bruised 

 them with his hatchet ; blood and flesh issued forth ; 

 and the intended victim, however distant, languished and 

 died. Like the sorcerer of the Middle Ages, he made 

 images of those he wished to destroy, and, muttering in- 

 cantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon tho 

 persons represented sickened and pined away. 



The Indian doctor relied far more on magic than on 

 natural remedies. Dreams, beating of the drum, songs, 

 magic feasts and dances, and howling to frighten the fe- 

 male demon from his patient, were his ordinary methods 

 of cure. 



