As Bayne looked out of the window, urging his mind to appraise the human
interest of the entourage, to apprehend its significance, he bethought
himself of a certain old Cherokee phrase that used to baffle him in his
philological studies. He remembered in a sort of dreary wonder that he
had once felt enough curiosity concerning this ancient locution to
maintain a correspondence with the Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian
Institution as to its precise signification--and now he could scarcely
make shift to recollect it.
He had then been hard on the track of the vanishing past; his wish was to
verify, solely for the sake of scholastic accuracy, these words of the
ancient Cherokee tongue, the Ayrate dialect, which was formerly the
language of their lowland settlements in this region, but which, since
the exodus of the majority of these Indians to the west and the fusion of
the lingering remnant of their upper and lower towns into this tribal
reservation east of the Great Smoky Mountains, has become lost, merged
with the Ottare (Atali) dialect, once distinctively the speech of their
highland villages only, but now practically modern Cherokee.
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