had, in former years, begun to clear a field, which,
however, his wives had never planted, they lay down in concealment,
waiting until the subsiding of the unusual bustle in the village, a
consequence manifestly of the excesses which Nathan predicted the victors
would indulge in, should render their further advance practicable. But
this was not the work of a moment. The savage can drink and dance through
the night with as lusty a zeal as his white neighbour; the song, the
jest, the merry tale, are as dear to his imagination; and in the
retirement of his own village, feeling no longer the restraint of stolid
gravity,--assumed in the haunts of the white man, less to play the part
of a hero than to cover the nakedness of his own inferiority,--he can
give himself up to wild indulgence, the sport of whim and frolic; and,
when the fire-water is the soul of the feast, the feast only ends with
the last drop of liquor.

It could be scarcely doubted that the Indians of the village were, this
night, paying their devotions to the Manito of the rum-keg, and drinking
folly and fury together from the enchanted draught, which one of the
bravest of the race--its adorer and victim, like Logan the heroic, and
Red-Jacket the renowned,--declared could only have been distilled "from
the hearts of wild-cats and the tongues of women,--it made him so fierce
and so foolish;" nor could it, on the other hand, be questioned that many
a sad and gloomy reminiscence, the recollection of wrong, of defeat, of
disaster, of the loss of friends and of country, was mingled in the joy
of the debauch. From their lurking-place near the village, the three
friends could hear many a wild whoop, now fierce and startling, now
plaintive and mourning,--the one, as Nathan and Ralph said, the halloo
for revenge, the other the whoop of lamentation,--at intervals chiming
strangely in with unmeaning shrieks and roaring laughter, the squeaking
of women and the gibbering of children, with the barking of curs, the
utterance of obstreperous enjoyment, in which the whole village, brute
and human, seemed equally to share. For a time, indeed, one might have
deemed the little hamlet an outer burgh of Pandemonium itself; and the
captain of horse-thieves swore, that, having long been of opinion "the
red abbregynes war the rule children of Sattan, and niggers only the
grand-boys, he should now hold the matter to be as settled as if booked
down in an almanac,--he would, 'tarnal death