his name.' A belt painted red or a bundle of blood, sticks, sent to the enemy, is a declaration of defiance. As the war-party leave the village, they address the women in a farewell hymn: "Do not weep for me, loved woman, should I die; weep for yourself alone.

I

go to revenge our relations fallen and slain; our foes shall lie like them; I go to lay them low." And, with the pride which ever marks the barbarian, each one adds, "If any man thinks himself a great warrior, I think myself the same."

The wars of the red men were terrible; not from their num bers, for, on any one expedition, they rarely exceeded forty men; it was the parties of six or seven which were the most to be dreaded. Skill consisted in surprising the enemy. They follow his trail, to kill him when he sleeps; or they lie in ambush near a village, and watch for an opportunity of suddenly surprising an individual, or, it may be, a woman and her children; and, with three strokes to each, the scalps of the victims being suddenly taken off, the brave flies back with his companions, to hang the trophies in his cabin, to go from village to village in exulting procession, to hear orators recount his deeds to the elders and the chief people, and, by the number of scalps taken with his own hand, to gain the high war-titles of honor. Nay, war-parties of but two or three were not uncommon. Clad in skins, with a supply of red paint, a bow, and quiver full of arrows, they would roam through the wide forest, as a bark would over the ocean; for days and weeks, they would hang on the skirts of their enemy, waiting the moment for striking a blow. It was the danger of such inroads, that, in time of war, made every English family on the frontier insecure.

The Romans, in their triumphal processions, exhibited captives to the gaze of the Roman people; the Indian conqueror compels them to run the gauntlet through the children and women of his tribe. To inflict blows that cannot be returned, is proof of full success, and the entire humiliation of their enemy; it is, moreover, an experiment of courage and patience. Those who show fortitude are applauded; the coward becomes an object of scorn.

us.

Voices of the Dead.

"He being dead yet speaketh." The departed have voices for

In order to illustrate this, I remark, in the first place, that the dead speak to us, and commune with us, through the works which they have left behind them. As the islands of the sea are the built-up casements of myriads of departed lives; as the earth itself is a great catacomb;-so we, who live and move upon its surface, inherit the productions and enjoy the fruits of the dead. They have bequeathed to us by far the larger portion of all that influences our thoughts, or mingles with the circumstances of our daily life. We walk through the streets they laid out. We inhabit the houses they built. We practice the customs they established. We gather wisdom from the books they wrote. We pluck the ripe clusters of their experience. We boast in their achievements. Every device and influence they have left behind tells their story, and is a voice of the dead. We feel this more impressively when we enter the customary place of one recently departed, and look around upon his work. The half-finished labor, the utensils hastily thrown aside, the material that exercised his care and received his last touch, all express him and seem alive with his presence. By them, though dead, he speaketh to us with a freshness and tone like his words of yesterday. How touching are those sketched forms, those unfilled outlines, in that picture which employed so fully the time and genius of the great artistBelshazzar's Feast! In the incomplete process, the transition state of an idea from its conception to its realization, we are brought closer to the mind of the artist; we detect its springs and hidden. workings, and therefore feel its reality more than in the finished effort. And this is one reason why we are more impressed at beholding the work just left than in gazing upon one that has been for a long time abandoned. Having had actual communion with

the contriving mind, we recognize its presence more readily in its production; or else the recency of the departure heightens the expressiveness with which everything speaks of the departed. The dead child's cast-off garments, the toy just tossed aside, startle us as though with his renewed presence. A year hence they will suggest him to us, but with a different effect.

The dead speak to us in memory and association. If their voices may be constantly heard in their works, we do not always heed them; neither have we that care and attachment for the great congregation of the departed, which will at any time call them up vividly before us. But in that congregation there are those whom we have known intimately and fondly, whom we cherished with our best love, who lay close to our bosoms. And these speak to us in a more private and peculiar manner,—in mementoes that flash upon us the whole person of the departed, every physical and spiritual lineament-in consecrated hours of recollection that open up all the train of the past, and re-twine its broken ties around our hearts, and make its endearments present still. Then, then, though dead, they speak to us. It needs not the vocal utterance nor the living presence, but the mood that transforms the scene and the hour supplies these. That face that has slept so long in the grave, now bending upon us, pale and silent, but affectionate still; that more vivid recollection of every feature, tone, and movement, that brings before us the departed, just as we knew them in the full flush of life and health; that soft and consecrating spell which falls upon us, drawing in our thoughts from the present, arresting, as it were, the current of our being, and turning it back and holding it still as the flood of actual life rushes by us,-while in that trance of soul the beings of the past are shadowed; old friends, old days, old scenes recur; familiar looks beam close upon us; familiar words re-echo in our ears, and we are closed up and absorbed with the by-gone, until tears dissolve the film from our eyes, and some shock of the actual wakes us from our reverie; all these, I say, make the dead to commune

with us as really as though in bodily form they should come out from the chambers of their mysterious silence and speak to us. And if life consists in experiences, and not mere physical contacts and if love and communion belong to that experience, though they take place in meditation, or dreams, or by actual contact then, in that hour of remembrance, have we really lived with the departed, and the departed have come back and lived with us. Though dead, they have spoken to us. And though memory sometimes induces the spirit of heaviness-though it is often the agent of conscience and wakens us to chastise-yet it is wonderful how, from events that were deeply mingled with pain, it will extract an element of sweetness. A writer, in relating one of the experiences of her sick-room, has illustrated this. In an hour of suffering, when no one was near her, she went from her bed and her room to another apartment, and looked upon a glorious landscape of sunrise and Spring-time. "I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture at the moment," she says, "but how was it at the end of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated, as completely vanished as if they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture forevermore." "Whence this wide difference," she asks, "between the good and the evil? Because the good is indissolubly connected with ideas-with the unseen realities which are indestructible." And though the illustration which she thus gives bears the impression of an individual peculiarity, instead of an universal truth, still, in the instance to which I apply it, I believe it will very generally hold true that memory leaves a pleasant rather than a painful impression. At least, there is so much that is pleasant mingled with it, that we would not willingly lose the faculty of memory-the consciousness that we can thus call back the dead and hear their voices-that we have the power of softening the rugged realities which only suggest our loss and disappointment, by transferring the scene and the hour to the past and the departed. And, as our conceptions become more and more spiritual, we shall find the real to be less dependent upon the

outward and the visible-we shall learn how much life there is in a thought how veritable are the communions of spirit with spirit; and the hour in which memory gives us the voices of the dead will be prized by us as an hour of actual experience, and such opportunities will grow more precious to us. No, we would not willingly lose the power of memory.`

Well, then, is it for us at times to listen to the voices of the dead. By so doing we are better fitted for life and for death. From that audience we go purified and strengthened into the varied discipline of our mortal state. We are willing to stay knowing that the dead are so near us, and that our communion with them may be so intimate. We are willing to go seeing that we shall not be wholly separated from those we leave behind. We will toil in our lot while God pleases, and when He summons us we will calmly depart. When the silver cord becomes untwined, and the golden bowl broken-when the wheel of action stands still in the exhausted cistern of our life, may we lie down in the light of that faith which makes so beautiful the face of the dying Christian, and has converted death's ghastly silence to a peaceful sleep. May we rise to a holier and more visible communing, in the land without a sin and without a tear. Where the dead shall be closer to us than in this life. Where not the partition of a shadow or a doubt shall come between.