Is like to that above."
The Council Tent was in darkness! The lights were out in the teepees. The whole camp was wrapped in solid slumber. And as we sunk to rest in our bed of new-mown hay, we breathed a prayer for the slumbering Sioux around us; May the Cloud, by day, and the Pillar of Fire, by night, guide the Sioux Nation through the Red Sea of Savagery, superstition and sin to the Promised Land of Christian Civilization.
The Native Missionary Society.
It is well worth a journey to the land of the Dakotas to witness an anniversary gathering of their Woman's Missionary Society. You enter the great Council Tent. It is thronged with these nut-brown women of the plains. A matronly woman welcomes you, and presides with grace and dignity. A bright and beautiful young maiden—a graduate of Santee or Good Will—controls the organ and sweetly leads the service of song. And oh how they do sing! You cannot understand the words, but the airs are familiar. Now it is Bishop Coxe's "Latter Day" sung with vim in the Indian tongue;
"We are living, we are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time;
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime."
And now some sedate matron rises and reads a carefully written paper, contrasting their past, vile teepee life of ignoble servitude to Satan, with their present, pure life of glorious liberty in the Lord Jesus Christ. And then they sing, so earnestly for they are thinking of their pagan sisters of the wild tribes, sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, in the regions beyond. The hymn is Draper's "Missionary Chant."
"Ye Christian heralds, go proclaim