enforce the claim. While the agent conversed with some one the Indian
was turned over to me. He was a magnificent specimen, six feet high,
clad in a long trailing scarlet blanket, with a scarlet straight feather
in his hair which continued him up _ad infinitum_, and he was straight as
a lightning rod. He was handsome, and very dignified and grave; but I
understood _that_. I can come it indifferent well myself when I am "out
of my plate," as the French, say, in strange society. He spoke no
English, but, as the agent said, knew six Indian languages. He was
evidently a chief by blood, "all the way down to his moccasins."

What with a few words of Kaw (I had learned about a hundred words of it
with great labour) and a few other phrases of other tongues, I succeeded
in interesting him. But I could not make him smile, and I swore unto
myself that I would.

Being thirsty, the Indian, seeing a cooler of ice-water, with the daring
peculiar to a great brave, went and took a glass and turned on the
_spicket_. He filled his glass--it was brim-full--but he did not know
how to _turn it off_. Then I had him. As it ran over he turned to me an
appealing helpless glance. I said "_Neosho_." This in Pottawattamie
means an inundation or overflowing of the banks, and is generally applied
to the inundation of the Mississippi. There is a town on the latter so
called. This was too much for the Indian, and he laughed aloud.

"Great God! what have you been saying to that Indian?" cried the agent,
amazed. "It is the first time he has laughed since he left home."

"Only a little pun in Pottawattamie. But I really know very little of
the language."

"I have no knowledge of the Indian languages," remarked our city editor,
MacGinnis, a genial young Irishman, "least of all, thank God! of
Pottawattamie. But I have always understood that when a man gets so far
in a tongue as to make _puns_ in it, it is time for him to stop."

Years after this I was one evening in London at an opening of an
exhibition of pictures. There were present Indian Hindoo princes in
gorgeous array, English nobility, literary men, and fine ladies. Among
them was an unmistakable Chippeway in a white Canadian blanket-coat,
every inch an Indian. I began with the usual greeting, "_Ho nitchi_!"
(Ho, brother!), to which he gravely replied. I tried two or three
phrases on him with the same effect. Then I played a sure card. Sinking
my voice with an inviting wi