excitement
rose, their garments, and even their weapons, for desperate gambling
is not confined to the hells of Paris. The men of the plains and the
forests no less resort to it as a violent but grateful relief to
the tedious monotony of their lives, which alternate between fierce
excitement and listless inaction. I fell asleep with the dull notes
of the drum still sounding on my ear, but these furious orgies lasted
without intermission till daylight. I was soon awakened by one of the
children crawling over me, while another larger one was tugging at
my blanket and nestling himself in a very disagreeable proximity. I
immediately repelled these advances by punching the heads of these
miniature savages with a short stick which I always kept by me for the
purpose; and as sleeping half the day and eating much more than is good
for them makes them extremely restless, this operation usually had to be
repeated four or five times in the course of the night. My host himself
was the author of another most formidable annoyance. All these
Indians, and he among the rest, think themselves bound to the constant
performance of certain acts as the condition on which their success in
life depends, whether in war, love, hunting, or any other employment.
These "medicines," as they are called in that country, which are usually
communicated in dreams, are often absurd enough. Some Indians will
strike the butt of the pipe against the ground every time they smoke;
others will insist that everything they say shall be interpreted by
contraries; and Shaw once met an old man who conceived that all would be
lost unless he compelled every white man he met to drink a bowl of cold
water. My host was particularly unfortunate in his allotment. The Great
Spirit had told him in a dream that he must sing a certain song in the
middle of every night; and regularly at about twelve o'clock his dismal
monotonous chanting would awaken me, and I would see him seated bolt
upright on his couch, going through his dolorous performances with a
most business-like air. There were other voices of the night still more
inharmonious. Twice or thrice, between sunset and dawn, all the dogs
in the village, and there were hundreds of them, would bay and yelp in
chorus; a most horrible clamor, resembling no sound that I have ever
heard, except perhaps the frightful howling of wolves that we used
sometimes to hear long afterward when descending the Arkansas on the
trail of Genera