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"Then bear this e to the council: I accept the belt; my answer shall be the answer of the Oneida nation; and with s Depart in peace, Bearer of Belts!"

Lightly, gracefully as a tree-lynx, he stooped and seized his rifle, wheeled, passed noiselessly across the road, turned, and buried hireen tops swayed, then not a ripple of the foliage, not a sound h the uncharted sea of trees

Mounting my roan, I wheeled him north at a sloalk, preoccupied, s where an Oneida now must needs answer a Mohawk as an Iroquois should once have answered an Erie or an Algonquin Alas for the great League! alas for the hty dead! Hiawatha! Atotarho! Where were they? Where noas our own Odasete; and Kanyadario, and the ue was already in sight; the Great Peace was broken; the downfall of the Confederacy was at hand

At that northern tryst at Thendara, the nine sachea, the fourteen sachea ten must look in vain for nine Oneidas And without them the Great Peace breaks like a rotten arrohere the war-head drops and the feathers fall froe, that I, a white ic catastrophe! Without ht subas had now heeded the League-Call--yes, even the Tuscaroras, too And as for those Delaware dogs, they had co to the lash of the stricken Confederacy, though noas their one chance in a hundred years to disobey and defy But the Lenape were ever woe, that I, a white ue-Council for the noblest clan of the Oneida nation!

That I had been adopted satisfied the hereditary law of chieftainship; that I had been selected satisfied the elective law of the sachems Rank follows the female line; the son of a chief never succeeded to rank It is the matron--the chief woman of the family--who chooses a dead chief's successor from the female line in descent; and thus Cloud on the Sun chose , heard the loud, ie from the council-fire as the sole that the antlers were lifted and the quiver slung across h, she died contented, and I, a lad, stood a chief of the Oneida nation Never since tias adopted Hiawatha, had a white councilor been chosen who had been accepted by family, clan, and national council, and ratified by the federal senate, excepting only Sir Williaonquin word "sachem," so seldom used, so difficult of pronunciation by the Iroquois, was never enate a councilor in council; there they used the title, Roy-a-neh, and to that title had I answered the belt of the Iroquois, in the name of Kayanehenh-Kowa, the Great Peace