the details of an earlier diplomatic occasion: "The speaker
rose up, and holding a bow in one hand and a sheaf of arrows in the
other, he delivered himself in the following words, with all the
distinctness imaginable, with the dignity and graceful action of a Roman
or Grecian orator, and with all their ease and eloquence."

10. _Page_ 231. Their tribal name, "men of fire," and their great
veneration for that element have given rise to the conjecture that the
Cherokees were originally fire-worshipers, as well as polytheistic. The
interpolation of the intensative syllable "ta" is, according to Adair, a
"note of magnitude," and the title of their prophets, whose functions
are blended as priests, conjurers, physicians, and councilors,--the
cheera-taghe,--signifies "men of divine fire." But Adair protests that
the theistic ideals of the Indians were wholly spiritual, and that they
had no plurality of gods. They paid their devotions merely to the "great
beneficent supreme holy spirit of fire, who resides as they think above
the clouds," and he argues plausibly that if they worshiped fire itself
they would not have willfully extinguished the sanctified element
annually on the last day of the old year throughout the nation, the
invariable custom, before the cheera-taghe of each town kindled the
"holy fire" anew, this being one of their exclusive functions. It may be
that in their ancient rhapsodies (many of which Mr. James Mooney has
collected for the Smithsonian Institution) addressed to bird or flame or
beast the Indians adopted a poetic license no more significant of
polytheism than the flights of fancy of many Christian poets in odes to
the moon, to Fate, "to the red planet Mars," to the "wild west wind."
Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not
necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from
a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the
civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its
fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance at the banker's, or the
Christianized Scotch Highlander of even the early nineteenth century who
threw a piece of hasty pudding over the left shoulder on the anniversary
of _Bealdin_ (the Gaelic for no other than Baal) to appease the spirits
of the mists, the winds, the ravens, the eagles, and thus protect the
crops and flocks. There is a thin boundary line as difficult to define
as "to distinguish