uter
fiber than cotton and with a hook of bone or thorn the painted fish from
their crystal water! To fell trees for canoes, to hollow the canoe, was
labor, as was the building of their huts, but divided among so many it
became light labor. In those days we saw no Indian figure bowed with
toil, and when it came it was not the Indian who imposed it.

But they swam, they rowed their canoes, they hunted in their not arduous
fashion, they roved afar in their country at peace, and they danced.
That last was their fair, their games, their tourney, their pilgrimage,
their processions to church, their attendance at mass, their expression
of anything else that they felt altogether and at once! It was like
children's play, renewed forever, and forever with zest. But they
did not treat it as play. We had been showed dances in Concepcion and
Isabella, but here in Cuba, in this inland town, Jerez and Luis and I
were given to see a great and formal dance, arranged all in honor of us,
gods descended for our own reasons to mix with men! They danced in the
square, but first they made us a feast with _hutias_ and cassava
and fish and fruit and a drink not unlike mead, exhilarating but not
bestowing drunkenness. Grapes were all over these lands, purple clusters
hanging high and low, but they knew not wine.

Men and women danced, now in separate bands, now mingled together.
Decorum was kept. We afterwards knew that it had been a religious dance.
They had war dances, hunting dances, dances at the planting of their
corn, ghost dances and others. This now was a thing to watch, like a
beautiful masque. They were very graceful, very supple; they had their
own dignity.

We learned much in the three days we spent in this town. Men and women
for instance! That nakedness of the body, that free and public mingling,
going about work and adventure and play together, worked, thought Juan
Lepe no harm. Later on in this vast adventure of a new world, some of
our churchmen were given to asserting that they lived like animals,
though the animals also are there slandered! The women were free and
complaisant; there were many children about. But matings, I thought,
occurred only of free and mutual desire, and not more frequently than in
other countries. The women were not without modesty, nor the men without
a pale chivalry. At first I thought constraint or rule did not enter in,
but after a talk with their priest through Diego Colon, I gathered that
there