Wilmington Journal

Indian Story.-Dr. Digby, in his "Shoe and Canoe, or Pictures of Travel in the Canadas," relates the following story, which was told him while engaged in a survey of the Lake of the Woods:

While we were purchasing bilberries, I noticed a sulky old Indian sitting apart on a somewhat high rock, with his arms round his legs and his head on his knees.

I asked "the little Englishman" who that wo-stricken man was, when he gave me the following statement:

Some years ago this Indian had strangled his lunatic son-his only son and favorite child.

The youth, eighteen years old, for a year or more, had refused to hunt, became abstracted, melancholy, and at times frenized.

When his paroxysms were coming on, he would warn his family to protect a particular sister from his unwilling violence, as he had an irresistible propensity to kill and devour her; and, in fact, he made several attempts upon her life.

After a time his lunacy, for such it was, changed its object, and he declared that he must murder and eat the first Indian he could master in the woods or elsewhere.

He now daily begged his father to put him to death, and so end his miseries.

The surrounding Indians took alarm at all this.

The father, as is usual in great emergencies, called a council. It sat several times, and after much deliberation, ordered the lunatic to be strangled by his own father, the giver of his life.

The father obeyed. The youth after listening to a long speech, and assenting aloud to every separate observation, bared his neck to the cord, and soon ceased to breathe. His body was burnt, lest he should rise again.

The parent never looked up more.