and the birds do sing, according to his own wise ordering. Now, lady,
you may see the mystery of the vultures! There come the buffaloes
themselves, and a noble herd it is! I warrant me, that Pawnee has a
troop of his people in some of the hollows, nigh by; and as he has
gone scampering after them, you are about to see a glorious chase. It
will serve to keep the squatter and his brood under cover, and for
ourselves there is little reason to fear. A Pawnee is not apt to be a
malicious savage."

Every eye was now drawn to the striking spectacle that succeeded. Even
the timid Inez hastened to the side of Middleton to gaze at the sight,
and Paul summoned Ellen from her culinary labours, to become a witness
of the lively scene.

Throughout the whole of those moving events, which it has been our
duty to record, the prairies had lain in the majesty of perfect
solitude. The heavens had been blackened with the passage of the
migratory birds, it is true, but the dogs of the party, and the ass of
the doctor, were the only quadrupeds that had enlivened the broad
surface of the waste beneath. There was now a sudden exhibition of
animal life, which changed the scene, as it were, by magic, to the
very opposite extreme.

A few enormous bison bulls were first observed, scouring along the
most distant roll of the prairie, and then succeeded long files of
single beasts, which, in their turns, were followed by a dark mass of
bodies, until the dun-coloured herbage of the plain was entirely lost,
in the deeper hue of their shaggy coats. The herd, as the column
spread and thickened, was like the endless flocks of the smaller
birds, whose extended flanks are so often seen to heave up out of the