shelling Indian-corn, or
engaged in some other domestic occupation; and the children, innocent of
clothing, tumble about on the ground. In travelling, the Indian mother
carries her child on her back. It is strapped to a board; and when a
halting-place is reached, the cradle and the child are hung upon a tree,
or on a pole inside the wigwam. Those who have communication with the
whites may be seen clothed in blanket garments, which the men wear in
the shape of coats; while the women swathe their bodies in a whole
blanket, which covers them from their shoulders to their feet.

Though the men assume a grave and dignified air when a stranger
approaches, they often indulge in practical jokes and laughter among
themselves; and in seasons of prosperity, appear good-humoured and
merry. The women, however, are doomed to lives of unremitting toil,
from the time they become wives. They are compelled to carry the
burdens, and to cultivate the ground, when any ground is cultivated, for
the production of potatoes, maize, and tobacco. The men condescend
merely to manufacture their arms and canoes, and to hunt; or they engage
in what they consider the noblest of employments, waging war on their
neighbours. The women, indeed, are often compelled to paddle the
canoes, sometimes to go fishing, and to carry the portable property from
place to place, or an overload of game when captured.

Intelligent as the Indian appears, it is evident that he has cultivated
his perceptive powers to the neglect of his spiritual and moral
qualities. His senses are remarkably acute. His memory is good; and
when aroused, his imagination is vivid, though wild in the extreme. He
is warmly attached to hereditary customs and manners. Naturally
indolent and slothful, he detests labour, and looks upon it as a
disgrace, though he will go through great fatigue when hunting or
engaged in warfare.

WOOD INDIANS.

The northern tribes are known as Wood Indians, in contradistinction to
the inhabitants of the open country, the Prairie Indians, who differ
greatly from the former in their habits and customs. All the tribes of
the Athabascas, as well as those to the south of them, known as the
Algonquins, are Wood Indians. They are nearly always engaged in hunting
the wild animals of the region they inhabit, for the sake of their furs,
which they dispose of to the agents of the Hudson Bay Company and other
traders, in exchange for blankets, firearms, hatchets