* A TRAMP WiTH REDSKINS.” 277 
into the white man’s country. A few had however 
so travelled, and had returned with a wondrous tale 
of how, at a place in the forest, ten or fourteen 
nights away, they had found a great gathering of Red- 
folk, of various tribes, come together to hear a story 
which a couple of white men were telling who had 
suddenly come .into those parts. The white men had 
talked and talked, and had taught the Redfolk to 
talk in the same way. Then the white men had taken 
the Redmen—as many of them as all the fingers 
and all the toes of all the people in Konkarmo— 
had taken them down to the river side, had put 
white dresses, like the dresses that the white women 
wear in the town, on these Redmen, had pushed them 
down into the water, and had then sent them away 
to their homes to be like white people. The re- 
turned travellers who had brought this wondrous tale 
to Konkarmo, had been obliged to confess that their 
skins were still red, not white—but perhaps that 
change took some time to bring about. And at 
any rate they showed that they had become like the 
two white men in the matter of talking. 
The result was that when I came to Konkarmo, I found 
a very large building, a curiously good imitation of a 
church, in which the people of the village sat all day chat- 
tering in the new tongue which they had learned from the 
two white men, and only occasionally stopping to listen 
to one of their own folk who chattered away for a long 
time by himself. Where, if the building had really been 
what it seemed to be, the altar would have been, was an 
altar-like platform of plain stems, and over this were 
stuck up a portrait, from the ///ustrated London - 
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