the more honorable, in proportion to the ferocity of the brute to which
it had originally belonged.

The weapons, too, were of every possible form and guise. Spears--some
pointed with iron, some with stone, and others shaped simply by being
burned to a point in the fire; bows and arrows, of every variety of
material and form, swords, daggers, slings, clubs, darts, javelins, and
every other imaginable species of weapon which human ingenuity, savage
or civilized, had then conceived. Even the lasso--the weapon of the
American aborigines of modern times--was there. It is described by the
ancient historian as a long thong of leather wound into a coil, and
finished in a noose at the end, which noose the rude warrior who used
the implement launched through the air at the enemy, and entangling
rider and horse together by means of it, brought them both to the
ground.

There was every variety of taste, too, in the fashion and the colors of
the dresses which were worn. Some were of artificial fabrics, and dyed
in various and splendid hues. Some were very plain, the wearers of them
affecting a simple and savage ferocity in the fashion of their vesture.
Some tribes had painted skins--beauty, in their view, consisting,
apparently, in hideousness. There was one barbarian horde who wore very
little clothing of any kind. They had knotty clubs for weapons, and, in
lieu of a dress, they had painted their naked bodies half white and half
a bright vermilion.

In all this vast array, the corps which stood at the head, in respect to
their rank and the costliness and elegance of their equipment, was a
Persian squadron of ten thousand men, called the Immortals. They had
received this designation from the fact that the body was kept always
exactly full, as, whenever any one of the number died, another soldier
was instantly put into his place, whose life was considered in some
respects a continuation of the existence of the man who had fallen.
Thus, by a fiction somewhat analogous to that by which the king, in
England, never dies, these ten thousand Persians were an immortal band.
They were all carefully-selected soldiers, and they enjoyed very unusual
privileges and honors. They were mounted troops, and their dress and
their armor were richly decorated with gold. They were accompanied in
their campaigns by their wives and families, for whose use carriages
were provided which followed the camp, and there was a long train of
camels besides, a