rian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried,
"Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the
story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a
school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who
rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked:
"Which way did them blamed Jews go?"

The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance of the new
teaching, may even really accept it (for it is very hard, indeed, to
follow and judge all the mental processes of an Indian)--yes, though it
expressly sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind
and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave him no paltry
net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to work upon with his conjurations;
yet the old superstition dies hard, often crops up when one had thought
it perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa, side by side
with definite, regular Christian worship.

[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]

The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute observer who has had
exceptional opportunities for observation of the intimate life of the
Esquimaux, has written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon
native superstition and the existence of both together, as though it
were some new thing or newly noticed by himself. Yet every one familiar
with the history of Christianity knows that it has characterised the
progress of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet that did
not in great measure do this thing, nor is it reasonable to suppose that
it could have been otherwise. It is impossible to make a _tabula rasa_
of men's minds. It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial
antiquity without leaving some rootlets behind. And what is acquired
joins itself insensibly to what is retained, and either the incongruity
is hidden beneath a change of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our
own social life is threaded through and through with customs and
practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The matter is such a
commonplace of history that it is bootless to labour it here.

A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name tends continually to
depreciate itself as the pursuit of physical science is divorced more
and more completely from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of
the humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance with
man, civilised or uncivilised. To come to