ting one end of a long piece in the mouth, cut off what they
could not get in, as Darwin noticed among the Fuegians. They keep no
domestic animals except fowls.

As to dress, they make use of a coarse cotton cloth, called _lienzo_,
woven by the more enlightened Indians of Quito, dyeing it a dull brown
by means of achote juice. The men wear a strip of this around the loins,
and the women a short skirt. On feast-days, or when musquitoes are
thick, the men add a little poncho and pantaloons. They do not properly
tattoo, but color the skin with achote or anatto. This substance, which
serves so many purposes in this part of the world, is the red powder
which covers the seeds contained in the prickly bur of the _Bixa
orellana_. The pigment is an article of commerce on the Amazon, and is
exported to Europe, where it is used for coloring butter, cheese, and
varnish. They have no fixed pattern; each paints to suit his fancy.
Usually, however, they draw horizontal bands from the month to the ears,
and across the forehead; we never saw curved lines in which higher
savages, like the Tahitians, tattoo.

The Napos have the provoking apathy of all the New World aborigines. As
Humboldt observed of another tribe, "their poverty, stoicism, and
uncultivated state render them so rich and so free from wants of every
kind, that neither money nor other presents will induce them to turn
three steps out of their ways." They maintain a passive dignity in their
bearing not seen in the proudest pope or emperor. They seldom laugh or
smile, even under the inspiration of chicha, and months of intercourse
with them did not discover to us the power of song, though Villavicencio
says they do sometimes intone fragments of prose in their festival
orgies. They manifest little curiosity, and little power of mimicry, in
which wild men generally excel the civilized.[99] The old Spartans were
never so laconic. In conversation each says all he has to say in three
or four words till his companion speaks, when he replies in the same
curt, ejaculatory style. A long sentence, or a number of sentences at
one time, we do not remember of hearing from the lips of a Napo
Indian.[100]

[Footnote 99: All savages appear to possess to an uncommon degree the
power of mimicry.--_Darwin_.]

[Footnote 100: Gibbon observes of his Indian paddlers on the Marmore:
"They talk very little; they silently pull along as though they were
sleeping, but their eyes are wandering all the