Their church edifice stands to-day on a hill, like the Celestial City, but it is a very dilapidated one. If you go there any summer Sunday, you shall find it untenanted save by the fowls of the air. They had a funeral there last season, for Death opens the old building sometimes, and on a window-ledge near where the gray-haired singers used to strike up "Mear" and "Corinth" and old "China," a mother-bird--a robin--sat undisturbed upon her nest. The good old Elder's grave across the road is sunken and weed-grown. "So runs the world away."
Writing of churches: By a sort of common consent, Modocs seem to be excepted from any general plan of salvation but the _Quaker_ plan. The writer once went as far West as the railroad could carry him, and then took the bare ground into Nebraska till he struck the Indian country, and found a Mission twenty years old in the wilderness. It is probable that very few of them deserved baptizing, but they all wanted washing. Having heard the little Indians sing hymns, you went about a mile and saw where they had buried a horse, that the dead brave might make a good appearance on the Happy Hunting Grounds, which they thought he would reach in about fourteen days.
You saw red-ochre fellows who were well up in the three R's--"reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic"--who had slipped back into the old burrows as naturally as woodchucks. You saw one young man, tolerably educated, who had served in the Federal army, and served well, sunning himself on the turfed slope of a summer wigwam. All that was left of his civilization was the tatters of a pair of blue pantaloons. He had slipped back into his blanket, and felt as much at home in it as a fawn in his spots, though the comparison is greatly damaging to the fawn. You ask him about this advance backwards, and he says, "'Mong white folks nothin' but _Ingen_. 'Mong Ingen _nobody_--come back tribe be good Ingen as any." And you have the situation clearly stated for your consideration.
You ask the missionary how many of the tribe he counts as Christian. He enumerates, and you wish to see one. He points him out, a villainous-looking old fellow with a lowering eye, and the most of his head packed like a knapsack behind his ears, and you think a little preliminary hewing and scoring would hardly come amiss to make him a safe man to meet in the night-time, and trim him down to Christian proportions. Say, with a hatchet, hew to a line commencing just in front of his organ of self-esteem, and make a clean sweep of things to a point just back of his ears. There would then be a better organization to begin upon. After that, Robert Raike's recipe, plenty of water with soap in it, would be in order. Then try catechisms. Catch an Indian young, and something may be made of him if he doesn't get away, but an old Indian is a tough creature to tame. You felt like asking the missionary if, this man being a Christian, there were many _sinners_ near by. If so, it seemed prudent to get back to the railroad without standing very particularly upon "the order of your going."