mortar and the badge of affluence, that sine qua non of Indian aristocracy, the cheap talking machine eternally playing its one record. There is unconscious humor, and often subtle wit, in much of his talk, and in his modern dialect, a hybrid language in which the simple dignity of the old poetic diction is now shot. through with the mixed idioms, the crudities, and the twisted phrases of borderland slang and of French-Canadian patois. The comedy in his character,—largely the humor of grotesqueness, inconsistency, and paradox,—is best suggested perhaps by the incongruities of the costume which he often wears at some idealistic old ceremonial dance; a nondescript outfit composed of buckskin moccasins and conspicuous white man's underwear, beaded medicine bag and shoddy trousers, eagle feathers and a battered derby hat.
It is the spirit of this more modern type of Indian,—and particularly of the more remote Northern woods Indian of Algonquian stock, with his peculiar anachronistic combination of the primitive and the modern, the tragic and the comic, the ideal and the real, the romantic and the drab, the spiritual and the material,—it is the spirit of this transitional type of red man which I wish to catch in Part I and Part III of this volume. I desire, furthermore, not only to catch the spirit of the woods Indian, but also, through the nature poems in Part II, to capture something of the atmosphere of the Indian's environment, of his setting of the Northern wilderness. If, therefore, the poems in this book convey in some degree
