o one of the Odjibwa tales, the morning star was once a
beautiful damsel that longed to go to 'the place of the breaking of
daylight." By the following poetic invocation of her brother, she was
raised upon the winds, blowing from 'the four corners of the earth,' to
the heaven of her hopes:--

Blow winds, blow! my sister lingers
From her dwelling in the sky,
Where _the morn with rosy fingers_,
Shall her cheeks with vermil dye.

There, my earliest views directed,
Shall from her their color take,
And her smiles, through clouds reflected,
Guide me on, by wood and lake.

"The work abounds with similar beautiful thoughts and inventions.

"Catlin may be called the red man's painter; Schoolcraft his poetical
historian. They have each painted in living colors the workings of the
Indian mind, and painted nature in her unadorned simplicity. They have
done much which, without them, would, perhaps, have remained undone, and
become extinct with the Indian race. As monuments of history for future
ages, their works are not sufficiently appreciated.

"The author of these volumes has stamped upon his page much of the
intellectual existence of the simple children of the forest, and
bequeathed us a detail map of their _terra incognita_--their fireside
amusements in legendary lore."

I am willing to notice this and some other criticisms of this work as
popular expressions of opinion on the subject. But it is difficult for
an editor to judge, from the mere face of the volumes, what an amount of
auxiliary labor it has required to collect these legends from the Indian
wigwams. They had to be gleaned and translated from time to time.
Seventeen years have passed since I first began them--not that anything
like this time, or the half of it, has been devoted to it. It was one of
my amusements in the long winter evenings--the only time of the year
when Indians will tell stories and legends. They required pruning and
dressing, like wild vines in a garden. But they are, exclusively (with
the exception of the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not
pumpings up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are
not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller
adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a
world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix, and
attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only do