Curiosities of Savage Life Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DREAM OF LIFE. 49 a fat church living. On the other hand, it is just as impossible for Cardinal Wiseman to be made Archbishop of Canterbury as for a savage, at least an American savage, to become "grand medicine," without, as a preliminary, earning his medicine bag. Let us take the young Ojibbeway. Through hia childhood, indeed until he begins to have some pretensions to manhood, he has no care or concern for religious matters. The Great Spirit, think the little savage's parents, is too solemn and grave a personage to be plagued by infants, who might indeed bring harm to themselves through their simple requests, and whims and petulancies. So the parents, poor simple souls, take on themselves the spiritual as well as the worldly welfare of their little ones. By-and-bye, however, comes a time when the young Indian is supposed to have grown sufficiently steady and sober to undergo one of the most important ceremonies of his life?the adopting of some bird or animal as a divine thing by which his future actions are to be guided, and by which ho hopes finally to be shewn the way to Paradise. Alone, or accompanied by a friend, the young fellow sets out for the forest, and having traversed it until he comes to a silent and unfrequented part, he climbs a tree, and makes himself a sort of couch. As he may chance to require this couch for some little time, he takes care to make it as comfortable as possible with layers of soft moss, and he likewise see that the branches overhead are dense enough to shelter him from the rain. Down he lies, and there, night and day, he continues till he dreams the dream of his life?the dream in which appears and figures conspicuously the animal to which in future he is to pay adoration. Perhaps it may be so small and insignificant a thing as a rat: p...