ving
things among his possessions--a practice already in its decadence among
the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of
civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there
throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects
to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, it is said,
and the great security of the fashioning of the sepulchres of the
Cherokees, may be attributed the fact that little of their pottery,
arms, beads, medals, the more indestructible of their personal
possessions, can be found in this region where so lately they were a
numerous people; for the effects of the dead, however valued, were never
removed or the graves robbed, even by an Indian enemy. The Cherokees
rarely permitted the presence of an alien at the ceremonies of the
interment of one of the tribe; but Varney in times past had seen and
heard enough to realize, without any definite effort of the imagination,
how Otasite, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, his beautiful English
face painted vermilion, would be placed in a sitting posture in front of
his house, and there in the sunlit afternoon remain for a space, looking
in, as it were, at the open door. Presently sounded the wild
lamentations and melancholy cadences of the funeral song; the tones rose
successively from a deep bass to a tenor, then to a shrill treble,
falling again to a full bass chorus, with the progression of the mystic
syllables, "_Yah! Yo-he-wah! Yah! Yo-he-wah!"_ (said to signify
"Jehovah"). This announced that the funeral procession, bearing the
body, was going thrice around the house of the dead, where he had lived
in familiar happiness these many years, and beneath which he would rest
in solemn silence in his deep, deep grave, covered with heavy timbers
and many layers of bark, and the stanch red clay, maintaining a sitting
posture, and facing the east, while the domestic life of homely cheer
would go on over his unheeding head as he awaited the distant and
universal resurrection of the body, in which the Cherokee religion
inculcated a full and firm faith.

The sun went down, and through all the night sounded the plaints of
grief. Late the moon rose, striking aslant on the melancholy Tennessee
River, full of deep shadows and vaguely pathetic pallid glimmers. A wind
sprang up for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness. A
frost fell with a keen icy chill. Mists gathered, and the day did