with muffled foot fall into the Valley of Night to the ultimate companionship of the stars.
In much of the seeming cacophony of the modern Indian's music there is lyric poetry. In the primitive dances to which the pagan elder folk have clung so tenaciously, and in which today the Indian sings his soul out of its rags back for a moment to the old glory of the wild days, there is a pungent, elemental charm. Rugged dignity and power mark his council oratory. A pagan spiritual beauty glitters in all the religious rituals that express his cosmic theory; for his pantheistic conception of the phenomena of nature is sublime in its personification of the wilderness, in its humanization of earth and sky and water, of beast and bird and reptile, of the flash of the lightning, the rumble of thunder, and the roar of the big winds. In the supernatural world created by his imagination. there is a weird mysticism; for the Indian walks through life ever beckoned by unseen hands, ever communing with the ghosts of the unseen spirit of beast and devil and god.
His life is not, however, wholly in shadow; it has its high lights of comedy and humor. There is humor in his naïve attempts to adapt himself to the white man's mode of living with its baffling machines and its incomprehensible customs; sometimes a ludicrous incongruity in his domestic environment with its agglomeration of primitive birch-basket and battered alarm clock, papoose cradle and broken sewing machine,—the latter often purchased as a thing of ornament rather than of utility,—quaint stone pestle and
