alking of the
Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy
conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an
Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?"
though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines
of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to
arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the
night before!

And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from
West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the
condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported
the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of
free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration
of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put
upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get
them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can
tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended
abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations
there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a
hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and
forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the
Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some,
obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as
an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this
pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory
school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems
an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write
English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing
else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?

These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve
hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's
twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and
dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight
leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the
trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's
"thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the
continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses,