ixion, he would have been burnt to death at a slow fire, while
men, women, and children would have danced about him, occasionally
applying torches and burning splinters to die most exquisitely sensible
parts of the frame, prolonging his torture, and exulting in it with the
demoniac exhilaration of gratified revenge.

This was the most common fate of prisoners of war at that time.
Sometimes they fastened the victim to a single stake, built a fire of
green wood about him, and then raising their yell of exultation, marched
off into the desert, leaving him to expire unheeded and alone. At other
times they killed their prisoners by amputating their limbs joint by
joint. Others they destroyed by pouring on them, from time to time,
streams of scalding water. At other times they have been seen to hang
their victim to a sapling tree by the hands, bending it down until the
wretched sufferer has seen himself swinging up and down at the play of
the breeze, his feet often, within a foot of the ground. In a word, they
seem to have exhausted the invention and ingenuity of all time and all
countries in the horrid art of inflicting torture.

The mention of a circumstance equally extraordinary in the Indian
character, may be recorded here. If the sufferer in these afflictions be
an Indian, during the whole of his agony a strange rivalry passes
between them which shall outdo each other, they inflicting, and he in
enduring these tortures. Not a groan, not a sigh, not a distortion of
countenance is allowed to escape him. He smokes, and looks even
cheerful. He occasionally chants a strain of his war song. He vaunts his
exploits performed in afflicting death and desolation in their villages.
He enumerates the names of their relatives and friends that he has
slain. He menaces them with the terrible revenge that his friends will
inflict by way of retaliation. He even derides their ignorance in the
art of tormenting; assures them that he had afflicted much more
ingenious torture upon their people; and indicates more excruciating
modes of inflicting pain, and more sensitive parts of the frame to which
to apply them.

They are exceedingly dexterous in the horrid surgical operation of
taking off the scalp--that is, a considerable surface of the hairy
integument of the crown of the cranium. Terrible as the operation is,
there are not wanting great numbers of cases of persons who have
survived, and recovered from it. The scalps of enemies thus take