Several anecdotes have been preserved in well-authenticated tradition, illustrative of these traits of character. One of these is the following:--Among the gentlemen of rank with whom Brant was acquainted, was a nobleman of whom it was scandalously reported that his place was purchased by the illicit favors bestowed upon another by his beautiful wife. On one occasion his Lordship undertook to rally the forest chief upon the subjects of the wild and rude manners and customs of the Indians, to which they pertinaciously adhered notwithstanding all the attempts made to improve them by the arts of civilization. Some of their absurd practices, of which the English, as his Lordship remarked, thought very strange, were particularised. Brant listened very patiently until it became his turn to speak, when he replied that there were customs in England, also, of which the Indians thought very strange. "And pray what are they?" inquired his Lordship. "Why," answered the chief, "the Indians have heard that it is a practice in England for men who are born chiefs to sell the virtue of their squaws for place, and for money to buy their venison!" The Mohawk occupied a position which enabled him to say what he pleased with impunity. But in the present instance the rebuke was doubly withering,--from the gravity and assumed simplicity with which it was uttered, and the certainty that the titled gentleman could not mistake the direction of the arrow, while he could neither parry nor avoid, nor appear to notice it.
During his stay in London, a grand fancy ball, or masquerade, was got up with great splendor, and numerously attended by the nobility and gentry. Captain Brant, at the instance of Earl Moira, was also present, richly dressed in the costume of his nation, wearing no mask, but painting one half of his face. His plumes nodded as proudly in his cap as though the blood of a hundred Percies coursed through his veins, and his tomahawk glittered in his girdle like burnished silver. There was, likewise, in the gay and gallant throng a stately Turkish _diplomat_ of rank, accompanied by two houris, whose attention was particularly attracted by the grotesque appearance of the chieftain's singular, and, as he supposed, fantastic attire. The pageant was brilliant as the imagination could desire; but among the whole motley throng of pilgrims and warriors, hermits and shepherds, knights, damsels, and gipsies, there was, to the eye of the Mussulman, no character so picturesque and striking as that of the Mohawk; which, being natural, appeared to be the best made up. He scrutinised the chief very closely, and mistaking his _rouge et noir_ complexion for a painted visor, the Turk took the liberty of attempting to handle his nose. Brant had, of course, watched the workings of his observation, and felt in the humor of a little sport. No sooner, therefore, had Hassan touched his facial point of honor, under the mistaken idea that it was of no better material than the parchment nose of the Strasburgh trumpeter, than the Chieftain made the hall resound with the appalling war-whoop, and at the same instant the tomahawk leaped from his girdle, and flashed around the astounded Mussulman's head as though his good master, the Sultan, in a minute more, would be relieved from any future trouble in the matter of taking it off. Such a piercing and frightful cry had never before rung through that _salon_ of fashion; and breaking suddenly, and with startling wildness, upon the ears of the merry throng, its effect was prodigious. The Turk himself trembled with terror, while the female masquers--the gentle shepherdesses, and fortune-telling crones, Turks, Jews and gipsies, bear-leaders and their bears, Falstaffs, friars, and fortune-tellers, Sultans, nurses and Columbines, shrieked, screamed and scudded away as though the Mohawks had broken into the festive hall in a body. The matter, however, was soon explained; and the incident was accounted as happy in the end as it was adroitly enacted by the good-humored Mohawk. [FN]