The Last of the Mohicans

by James Fenimore Cooper

In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions.

“Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?”

“I rubbed the bark off a limb, perhaps, but the creature leaped the longer for it. A rifle bullet acts on a running animal, when it barks him, much the same as one of your spurs on a horse; that is, it quickens motion, and puts life into the flesh, instead of taking it away. But when it cuts the ragged hole, after a bound or two, there is, commonly, a stagnation of further leaping, be it Indian or be it deer!”

A man had better sleep without his scalp, than famish in the midst of plenty.”

“Yes,” muttered the Indian, in his native tongue; “the pale faces are prattling women! they have two words for each thing, while a red-skin will make the sound of his voice speak to him.”

“you are once more master of your own limbs, though you seem not to use them with much greater judgment than that in which they were first fashioned.

“The eyes of a white man are too heavy and too blind for such a watch as this!

“If the Jewish boy might tame the great spirit of Saul by the sound of his harp, and the words of sacred song, it may not be amiss,” he said, “to try the potency of music here.”

One moccasin is no more like another than one book is like another: though they who can read in one are seldom able to tell the marks of the other.

“David is a living proof that the Hurons can be merciful.” “Ay, but David can use his throat, as no man in his senses would pervart the gift.”

“The Delawares have been like bears after the honey pots, prowling around my village. But who has ever found a Huron asleep?”

“You might not startle a wolf, or turn the Royal Americans from a discharge; but I have seen the time when you had a better favored look; your streaked countenances are not ill-judged of by the squaws, but young women of white blood give the preference to their own color.

However implicit the faith of David was in the performance of ancient miracles, he eschewed the belief of any direct supernatural agency in the management of modern morality.

All perceived that more was meant than was uttered, and each one believed that the hidden meaning was precisely such as his own faculties enabled him to understand, or his own wishes led him to anticipate.

“The Spirit that made men colored them differently,” commenced the subtle Huron. “Some are blacker than the sluggish bear. These He said should be slaves; and He ordered them to work forever, like the beaver.

Some He made with faces paler than the ermine of the forests; and these He ordered to be traders; dogs to their women, and wolves to their slaves. He gave this people the nature of the pigeon; wings that never tire; young, more plentiful than the leaves on the trees, and appetites to devour the earth.

“Huron, her mind is in the tents of her fathers. An unwilling maiden makes an unhappy wigwam.”

“Men speak not twice.”

“It would be an unequal exchange, to give a warrior, in the prime of his age and usefulness, for the best woman on the frontiers.