me, for I do not know.
We were when we first knew we were; we lived when we first found we had
breath, further than that I cannot tell you. How should I know more? If
a man, while he was wrapped in a deep sleep, should be carried to a far
land which he had never seen before, would he know where he was when he
waked? or could he tell how he came thither? no, nor can I tell you the
manner of the creation of man, or name, with certainty, his creator.

"But this we do know--when we are born, we are helpless children. The
Narragansetts once were such. Even when they had grown to the stature
of men, their warriors were nothing but big boys; their chiefs and
councillors no wiser than old women. There was a time when they had no
bow and arrow, no hatchet, no canoe, no cabin, no corn. They were
ignorant and foolish as white men. They would have mistaken the track of
the moose for that of a wild cat; they would have thought the tread of a
land-tortoise the trail of the grey snake; they would have killed an owl
and feasted upon it, for a heath-hen. They had nothing but feet to walk
with, hands to catch fish with, and tongues which loved best to utter
wicked lies and speak foolish words. They were only fit to serve bad
spirits, the men of the Spirit of Evil, whom they called Hobbamock(1).
And they did serve him, night and day, but he would give them very
little for their worship, treating them worse than he treated any tribe
upon the borders of the Great Lake. The Pequods killed more whales; the
people of Nope raised more _poke_. When a Narragansett caught a deer,
it was always a sick one, and had no fat upon it, and when he speared a
fish, it had only a backbone. He was, in truth, a very ungrateful
master."

There was among the Narragansetts a very wise conjuror(2) or priest,
whose name was Sasasquit. He was the priest of the Good Spirit; he was a
good man; much better than the rest of the tribe, for he never served
the Evil Spirit. He said to the Narragansetts, "If you were better men,
if you served my master, the Good Spirit, as you do the Evil Spirit, he
would give you abundance of good things. You would not, as you do now,
catch fish with heads as big as mine, and bodies no bigger than my arm,
but would take fat fish, and would take them with little trouble. You
would snare birds more easily, and, perhaps, have other gifts which now
you do not dream of."

The Sachem said to the people, "Sasasquit talks well, but talking well