Droll incidents were of constant occurrence in this life. Out of a myriad I will note a few. One day there came into our office an Indian agent from the West, who had brought
with him a Winnebago who claimed to be the rightful chief of his tribe. They were going to Washington to enforce the claim. While the agent conversed with some one the Indian was turned over to me. He was a magnificent specimen, six feet high, clad in a long trailing scarlet blanket, with a scarlet straight feather in his hair which continued him up ad infinitum, and he was straight as a lightning rod. He was handsome, and very dignified and grave; but I understood that. I can come it indifferent well myself when I am “out of my plate,” as the French, say, in strange society. He spoke no English, but, as the agent said, knew six Indian languages. He was evidently a chief by blood, “all the way down to his moccasins.”
What with a few words of Kaw (I had learned about a hundred words of it with great labour) and a few other phrases of other tongues, I succeeded in interesting him. But I could not make him smile, and I swore unto myself that I would.
Being thirsty, the Indian, seeing a cooler of ice-water, with the daring peculiar to a great brave, went and took a glass and turned on the spicket. He filled his glass—it was brim-full—but he did not know how to turn it off. Then I had him. As it ran over he turned to me an appealing helpless glance. I said “Neosho.” This in Pottawattamie means an inundation or overflowing of the banks, and is generally applied to the inundation of the Mississippi. There is a town on the latter so called. This was too much for the Indian, and he laughed aloud.
“Great God! what have you been saying to that Indian?” cried the agent, amazed. “It is the first time he has laughed since he left home.”
“Only a little pun in Pottawattamie. But I really know very little of the language.”
“I have no knowledge of the Indian languages,” remarked our city editor, MacGinnis, a genial young Irishman, “least of all, thank God! of Pottawattamie. But I have always
understood that when a man gets so far in a tongue as to make puns in it, it is time for him to stop.”
Years after this I was one evening in London at an opening of an exhibition of pictures. There were present Indian Hindoo princes in gorgeous array, English nobility, literary men, and fine ladies. Among them was an unmistakable Chippeway in a white Canadian blanket-coat, every inch an Indian. I began with the usual greeting, “Ho nitchi!” (Ho, brother!), to which he gravely replied. I tried two or three phrases on him with the same effect. Then I played a sure card. Sinking my voice with an inviting wink, I uttered “Shingawauba,” or whisky. “Dot fetched him.” He too laughed. Gleich mit gleich, gesellt sich gern.
While living in New York, and during my connection with the Press, I often met and sometimes conversed with Horace Greeley. Once I went with him from Philadelphia to New York, and he was in the car the observed of all observers to an extraordinary degree. He sat down, took out an immense roll of proof, and said, “Lead pencil!” One was immediately handed to him by some stranger, who was by that one act ennobled, or, what amounts to the same thing in America, grotesquely charactered for life. He was the man who gave Horace Greeley a lead pencil! I, as his companion, was also regarded as above ordinary humanity. When the proof was finished “Horace” said to me—