night, they form a suggestive background on which the vivid and energetic
drama of our novel civilization stands out in sharp relief.

Scarcely less mysterious--though living among us still--are the red men
whom we found here. They had no written languages or history; their
knowledge of their own past was confined to vague and fanciful traditions.
They were few in numbers, barbarous in condition, untamable in nature;
they built no cities and practiced no industries: their women planted
maize and performed all menial labors; their men hunted and fought. Before
we came, they fought one another; our coming did not unite them against a
common enemy; it only gave each of them one enemy the more. After an
intercourse of four hundred years, we know as little of them as we did at
first; we have neither educated, absorbed nor exterminated them. The
fashion of their faces, and some other indications, seem to point to a
northern Asiatic ancestry; but they cannot tell us even so much as we can
guess. There have been among them, now and again, men of commanding
abilities in war and negotiation; but their influence upon their people
has not lasted beyond their own lives. Amid the roar and fever of these
latter ages, they stand silent, useless, and apathetic. They belong to our
history only in so far as their savage and treacherous hostility
contributed to harden the fortitude of our earlier settlers, and to weld
them into a united people.

Posterity may resolve these obscurities; meanwhile they remain in
picturesque contrast to the merciless publicity of our own life, and the
scientific annihilation of time and distance. They are as the dark and
amorphous loam in which has taken root the Flower of the Ages. If extremes
must meet, it was fitting that the least and the most highly developed
examples of mankind should dwell side by side, at the close of the
nineteenth century, in a land to which neither is native: that Europe, the