refore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act
as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could
afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige
of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious
wiles the cat was duly belled.

But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the
virtues--to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have
conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they
had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more
powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the
lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on
their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their
making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the
years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the
binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of
the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as
the Cherokee,--who, although allied neither linguistically nor
consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected
an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"--could their
rightful independence be recognized, reestablished, and maintained.
Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in
exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called,
Lenni Lenape.

Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all
suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would
not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not
witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He
even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it
chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces
contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion
of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy
rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately
involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These
successive circles, one within another, followed each a different
direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute,
fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous
sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired
figure