hind us.
The new we seek to find. We are passing, passing by."

Crawling Elk followed, holding aloft a spear with a green plume; it was
a turnip thrust through with a sharp-pointed, blackened stick, and
behind him, two and two, came fifty of his young warriors carrying
shining hoes upright, as of old they carried their lances, while at
their shoulders, where quivers of arrows should have swung, dangled trim
sheaves of green wheat and golden barley. The free fluttering of their
feather-ornamented hair, the barbaric painting on their faces and hands,
symbolized the old life, as the green arrows of the grain prefigured the
new. Behind them rode their women, each bearing in her left hand a bunch
of flowers. Those who could read wore on their bosoms a small, shining
medal, and in their hair an eagle feather. No Tetong woman had ever worn
a plume before.

Standing Elk, quaint and bent, rode by, singing a war-song, magnificent
in his dress as war chief, leading some twenty young men. His hands were
empty of the signs of peace, and his face was rapt with dreams of the
past, but his young men carried long-handled forks which flamed in the
sun, and bracelets of green grass encircled their firm, brown arms.
They, too, were painted to signify their clan and their ancestry, and
the "medicine" they affected was on their breasts. Their wives were
close behind, each bearing a stalk of corn in bloom; their beaded
saddles and gay blankets were pleasant to see. Every weapon bespoke
warfare against weeds. Every ornament represented the better nature, the
striving, the aspiration of its wearer.

Then came the school-children, adding a final note of pathos, poor
little brown men and women trudging on foot to symbolize that they must
go through life, plodding in the dust of the white man's chariot
wheel--their toes imprisoned in a shapeless box of leather, their hair
closely clipped, their clothing hot and restrictive. Each carried a book
and a slate, and their faces were very intent and serious as they paced
by on their way from the old to the new. They were followed by the
school-band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," with splendid disregard
of the broken faith of the government whose song it was.

And so they streamed by, these folk, accounted the most warlike of all
red men, genially carrying out the wishes of their chief, illustrating,
without knowing it, the wondrous change which had come to them; the old
men still clinging to