ordained the Lenapes. They were unanimous in this opinion. Yet
they advised, that the Master of Life should be consulted by
sacrifices, after the due fasts should have been kept, and that his
assistance should be supplicated by songs and dances(3), as they were
ever wont to be. The advice of the expounders of dreams was followed,
and the priests prepared for the fast. First they feasted themselves,
and the chiefs, and warriors. The remains of the feast were then
removed to the outside of the camp, and the crumbs carefully swept
out, till the cabin, in which the fast was to be held, was as clean as
the brow of a grassy hill after a summer rain. Then it was proclaimed
aloud by the head priest, that the warriors and chiefs of the Lenape
nation should enter the cabin, and observe the fast, and that the
women and children, and all who are uninitiated in war, who had never
hung up a scalp-lock in the temple of the Wahconda, nor offered a
victim to the Great Star, should keep apart from those who had done
both. When those who had bound themselves to observe the sacred
ceremonial had entered the holy square appointed for the fast, a man
armed with the weapons of war was stationed at each of the corners, to
keep out every thing except the initiated. If a dog had but dared to
breathe upon the sacred spot, he had met the fate of a thievish
Flathead.

Then the Lenapes drank, as is their wont, of the root[A], which purges
away their evil and cowardly inclinations and propensities, making
them tellers of nothing but truth, bold and strong in war, cunning and
dexterous in the theft of horses, patient in scarcity, and beneath the
torments of the victor. The while they filled the air with loud
invocations to the great Wahconda, and with petitions to him, that, in
the succeeding sacrifice, he would reveal the meaning of the dream
which had so filled their minds. Lest the unexpiated sins of the
uninitiated, the women and the children, should stifle their own purer
voices, the priest sent by the hands of the oldest of the women a
portion of the small green leaves of the beloved weed[B] to the
sinners. And thus, for three suns, the priests and warriors of the
Lenapes ate no food, but mortified their sinful appetites to please
the Master of Life.

[Footnote A: Button snakeroot.]

[Footnote B: Tobacco.]

The fast being over, and the expiation made, according to the customs
of the nation, the multitude assembled to the feast and sacrific