of blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other. This, in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious wiles the cat was duly belled.

But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the virtues—to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as the Cherokee,—who, although allied neither linguistically nor consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"—could their rightful independence be recognized, reëstablished, and maintained. Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called, Lenni Lenape.

Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These successive circles, one within another, followed each a different direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute, fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous sonorities of the earthen drums; and as