INDIAN STORIES. 285 



woman, * and gradually increases in animation as he 

 relates the incidents of his stirring life. No story of the 

 chase can be compared to an Indian brave's account of a 

 combat with his great enemy, the Grisly. The death of 

 a foeman on the field of battle becomes comparatively a 

 flat and uninteresting subject if related after this moving 

 adventure. 



We Europeans, accustomed to the modern hunts, the 

 most dangerous of which is against the boar, tearing and 

 rending with his tusks every obstacle that falls in his way : 

 trees, men, and dogs, are little inclined to accredit these 

 perilous attacks, are little able to understand these emo- 

 tions which so agitate the heart as to make it throb like a 

 timid girl's ; and in our scepticism we are always tempted 

 to regard as a fiction any fact which rises above the dull 

 level of our hunting experience. 



Keposing in the rude tent of the Eedskins, I have often 

 listened to the stories told by men, who, surrounded by 

 the vastness of seemingly boundless plains, living in the 

 midst of apparently interminable forests, compared with 

 whose aged giants the tallest trees of Europe are but as 

 pygmies, have no need to deepen the shadows of the 

 picture to bring its beauties into brighter relief. The 

 reality is too sublime and too terrible for exaggeration. 

 For the very reason that the Indian has not profited by 

 civilization, he has not been sullied by it. For me, ex- 

 aggeration and braggadocio are proofs of feebleness, and 

 these two signs of degeneracy have not yet penetrated 

 into the midst of the North American prairies. 



* [This uncourteous comparison is the author's, not the translator's.] 



