and good, there is also a great deal of that terror-stricken
pietism which refuses to attend the theatre unless it is very bad
indeed, and is called "Museum." This limits the business of the theatre;
and as a good theatre is necessarily a very expensive institution, it
improves very slowly, although the Western people are in precisely that
state of development and culture to which the drama is best adapted and
is most beneficial. We should naturally expect to find the human mind,
in the broad, magnificent West, rising superior to the prejudices
originating in the little sects of little lands. So it will rise in due
time. So it has risen, in some degree. But mere grandeur of nature has
no educating effect upon the soul of man; else Switzerland would not
have supplied Paris with footmen, and the hackmen of Niagara would spare
the tourist. It is only a human mind that can instruct a human mind.

* * * * *

To witness the performance, and to observe the rapture expressed
upon the shaggy and good-humored countenances of the boatmen, was
interesting, as showing what kind of banquet will delight a human soul,
starved from its birth. It likes a comic song very much, if the song
refers to fashionable articles of ladies costume, or holds up to
ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse
to a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently
apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue
has been cut away, while all the action is retained,--in which people
are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great
violence. It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play a part in
a negro farce, and become the victim of designing colored brethren. But
what joy, when the beauteous Terpsichorean nymph bounds upon the scene,
rosy with paint, glistening with spangles, robust with cotton and cork,
and bewildering with a cloud of gauzy skirts! What a vision of beauty
to a man who has seen nothing for days and nights but the hold of a
steamboat and the dull shores of the Mississippi!

* * * * *

HISTORY, GENERAL AND SPECIAL.

=_John Heckewelder,[33] 1743-1823._=

From the "Narrative" of the Moravian Missions among the Indians.

=_112._= SETTLEMENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN INDIANS.

Both these congregations, being supplied with missionaries and
schoolmasters, were so prosperous that they became the adm