n the hospitals and orphan asylums, but found
the sphere too contracted. She felt that she needed the stimulus of
public approval. She was almost in despair, when, as if by accident,
her eye lighted on the North American Indian. For centuries he had
been chasing the buffalo and the white man, shooting and being shot,
taking up the tomahawk and perishing by the rifle, robbing and being
robbed, massacring and pillaging whenever massacre and pillage suited
his grim humor, and being all this while alternately pampered and
starved, cajoled and cheated, by a government which at the same time
that it furnished him with guns for shooting its own soldiers, often
failed to fulfil the solemn treaties it had made with him.

He had been having this lively and variegated experience for a century
or so, without any intimation, prophetic or present, of Miss Slopham's
existence, when that lady discovered him, and when that happened she
exclaimed: "He is mine!" Hers, she meant, for the purposes of
philanthropy. Wicked tongues had suggested that in Miss Slopham's
philanthropy distance lent enchantment to the view.

Only a day or two later, and before she had had time to form any
plans, the postman brought a letter with the postmark of St. Louis. It
read as follows:

"ST. LOUIS, _October 20, 1881_.

"MY DEAR MISS SLOPHAM,--I want to make an appeal to your
benevolence, which I know never fails in case of need. There
is in this city at this moment, in hiding, at the house of
one of our friends, a poor persecuted Kickapoo. A Kickapoo
is an Indian, you know. He has fled from his reservation
because, he says, he cannot endure any longer the
persecutions and wrongs he has received at the hands of the
agent who has charge of the tribe. This agent must be a very
bad man. Poor Ogla-Moga--that is his name; it means
Young-man-who-digs-up-seed-potatoes-and-feeds-them-to-his-pony,
he says, but we call him by his Indian name because it's so
much prettier--says that this agent has repeatedly refused
to let them go hunting, which is the only amusement the poor
things have, on the miserable pretext that the hay must be
got in; and he once took away the gun of one of the
Kickapoos because he pretended to believe that the man had
shot a settler, whereas there was no proof of it at all,
except, Ogla-Moga says, that the man died soon after th