of our nature, nor should we conclude too hastily against
him,--he also has his sympathies, and those of no common order. He also
loves his parent that begat him, and his child whom he has begotten,
with intense affection; he is not without affection from nature; but
perverted principle has perverted nature; and as his principle is, so
is his practice. Our surprise ceases when we learn that he is trained
up in blood, that he is catechized in cruelty, and that he is
instructed not in slaughter only, but in torment. Nothing that has life
without the pale of his own immediate circle not only does not escape
destruction, but is visited with torment also inflicted by his infant
hand. If his eye in passing by the lake observes the frog moving in the
rushes he instantly seizes his victim, and does not merely destroy it,
but often ingeniously torments it by pulling limb from limb. If the
duck be but wounded with the gun, his prey is not instantly despatched
to spare all future pain, but feather is plucked out after feather, and
the hapless creature is tormented on principle. I have frequently
witnessed the cruelty with which parents will sometimes amuse their
children, by catching young birds or animals, that they may disjoint
their limbs to make them struggle in a lingering death. And a child is
often seen twisting the neck of a young duck or goose, under the
laughing encouragements of the mother for hours together, before it is
strangled. At one moment he satisfies the cravings of nature from the
breast of his mother, and instantly rewards the boon with a violent
blow perhaps on the very breast on which he has been hanging. Nor does
the mother dare resent the injury by an appeal to the father. He would
at once say that punishment would daunt the spirit of the boy. Hence
the Indian never suffers his child to be corrected. We see then the
secret spring of his character. He is a murderer by habit, engendered
from his earliest age; and the scalping knife and the tomahawk, and the
unforgiving pursuit of his own enemy, or his father's enemy, till he
has drenched his hands in, and satiated his revenge with his blood, is
but the necessary issue of a principle on which his education has been
formed. The training of the child forms the maturity of the man.

Our Sunday school is generally attended by nearly fifty scholars,
including adults, independent of the Indian children; and the
congregation consists upon an average of from one hund