Southern Telegraph

ANECDOTE OF AN INDIAN.

LEIGH RITCHIE, the novelist, has contributed 'Some account of the Barbarians of the North' to the London New Monthly, comprising the result of his observations during a recent journey to and residence in Moscow. We find among his notes the following Aboriginal anecdote, related to the writer by our Ambassador at St. Petersburg, Hon. William Wilkins, which possesses an interest quite dramatic.

"The son of a Delaware chief was brought up from infancy as the playmate and friend of Mr. Wilkins. No difference whatever was made between the two boys; their dress, their meals, their beds, their education—all were alike; and the lads themselves regarded one another as brothers.

When young Wilkins arrived at the years when it was necessary for him to go to college, his companion was in every respect—in appearance, in language, in feeling—an Anglo-American boy; and the two friends parted in hope of meeting again, unchanged except in the addition of four years to their age and a corresponding number of inches to their stature.

"In four years young Wilkins returned to the parental home; and while crossing the threshold of the house, his tumultuous thoughts perhaps fully as much occupied by the friend into whose arms he was about to rush, as by any member of his father's family. He caught the eye, however of a naked Indian sitting on the bench before the door and paused as he was about to enter.—The object, though picturesque, was common, and he turned his head, without knowing why, to look again at the face of the savage. The red youth then smiled; and his question 'Do you not know me?' explained all.

"After his friend went to college, and when he was thrown back, as it were upon his own mind, the Delaware boy as he said himself was beset by strange wild thoughts, which he could neither understand nor describe. He felt an unconquerable longing for the liberty of the woods; thirsting after the air of the desert; and after struggling long and fiercely against a propensity which his habits of civilization persuaded him to be evil, and for the existence of which he could not in any manner account be at length tore off his European dress and fled into the wilderness. I cannot call to mind the name of this Indian; but he became a distinguished chief in the wars with the English, and was celebrated not only for bravery but for cunning. He was at length suspected of playing false on both sides; and Mr. Wilkins in riding through a wood, saw accidentally the body of his early friend lying dead, and horribly mangled at the foot of a tree. The Delaware had been murdered by his own countrymen."