Can you give a reason for such a belief ?" "The reasons are numerous and powerful," returned the Doctor, delighted by this encouraging opening.

"Look into the plains of Egypt and Arabia; their sandy deserts teem with the monuments of their antiquity; and then we have also recorded documents of their glory; doubling the proofs of their former greatness, now that they lie stripped of their fertility; while we look in vain for similar evidences that man has ever reached the summit of civilisation on this continent, or search, without our reward, for the path by which he has made the downward journey to his present condition of second childhood." "And what see you in all this ?" demanded the trapper, who, though a little confused by the terms of his companion, seized the thread of his ideas.
"A demonstration of my problem, that nature did not make so vast a region to lie an uninhabited waste so many ages.

This is merely the moral view of the subject; as to the more exact and geological--" "Your morals are exact enough for me," returned the old man, "for I think I see in them the very pride of folly.

I am but little gifted in the fables of what you call the Old World, seeing that my time has been mainly passed looking natur' steadily in the face, and in reasoning on what I've seen, rather than on what I've heard in traditions.

But I have never shut my ears to the words of the good book, and many is the long winter evening that I have passed in the wigwams of the Delawares, listening to the good Moravians, as they dealt forth the history and doctrines of the elder times, to the people of the Lenape! It was pleasant to hearken to such wisdom after a weary hunt! Right pleasant did I find it, and often have I talked the matter over with the Great Serpent of the Delawares, in the more peaceful hours of our out-lyings, whether it might be on the trail of a war-party of the Mingoes, or on the watch for a York deer.