Palace, but to the red man as the "Tepee of the Great White
Father." And this is what I see:--

What the Indian Sees.

Lifting toward the sky are vast buildings of stone, not the same
kind of stone from which my forefathers fashioned their carven
pipes and corn-pounders, but a grayer, grimier rock that would not
take the polish we give by fingers dipped in sturgeon oil, and long
days of friction with fine sand and deer-hide.

I stand outside the great palace wigwam, the huge council-house by
the river. My seeing eyes may mark them, but my heart's eyes are
looking beyond all this wonderment, back to the land I have left
behind me. I picture the tepees by the far Saskatchewan; there
the tent poles, too, are lifting skyward, and the smoke ascending
through them from the smouldering fires within curls softly on the
summer air. Against the blurred sweep of horizon other camps etch
their outlines, other bands of red men with their herds of wild
cattle have sought the river lands. I hear the untamed hoofs
thundering up the prairie trail.

But the prairie sounds are slipping away, and my ears catch other
voices that rise above the ceaseless throb about me--voices that
are clear, high, and calling; they float across the city like the
music of a thousand birds of passage beating their wings through
the night, crying and murmuring plaintively as they journey
northward. They are the voices of St. Paul's calling, calling
me--St. Paul's where the paleface worships the Great Spirit, and
through whose portals he hopes to reach the happy hunting grounds.