sweetest bird-song; and this, like the bird-song, is only practised to
allure a mate. The Indian, become a citizen and a husband, no more
thinks of playing the flute than one of the _settled-down_ members of
our society would of choosing the purple light of love as dyestuff for a
surtout."

Of the island itself Margaret writes:--

"It was a scene of ideal loveliness, and these wild forms adorned it, as
looking so at home in it."

The Indian encampment was constantly enlarged by new arrivals, which
Margaret watched from the window of her boarding-house.

"I was never tired of seeing the canoes come in, and the new arrivals
set up their temporary dwellings. The women ran to set up the tent-poles
and spread the mats on the ground. The men brought the chests, kettles,
and so on. The mats were then laid on the outside, the cedar boughs
strewed on the ground, the blanket hung up for a door, and all was
completed in less than twenty minutes. Then they began to prepare the
night meal, and to learn of their neighbors the news of the day."

In these days, in which a spasm of conscience touches the American heart
with a sense of the wrongs done to the Indian, Margaret's impressions
concerning our aborigines acquire a fresh interest and value. She found
them in occupation of many places from which they have since been driven
by what is called the march of civilization. We may rather call it a
barbarism better armed and informed than their own. She also found among
their white neighbors the instinctive dislike and repulsion which are
familiar to us. Here, in Mackinaw, Margaret could not consort with them
without drawing upon herself the censure of her white acquaintances.

"Indeed, I wonder why they did not give me up, as they certainly looked
upon me with great distaste for it. 'Get you gone, you Indian dog!' was
the felt, if not the breathed, expression towards the hapless owners of
the soil; all their claims, all their sorrows, quite forgot in
abhorrence of their dirt, their tawny skins, and the vices the whites
have taught them."

Missionary zeal seems to have been at a standstill just at this time,
and the hopelessness of converting those heathen to Christianity was
held to excuse further effort to that end. Margaret says:--

"Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and intelligence, have
been civilized and made a valuable ingredient in the new State, I will
not say; but this we are sure of, the French Catholi