ering fewer charms
than did their residence, were in many respects scarcely less
interesting. In front of the foremost hut was assembled a group of
creatures with dark shining skins, which, at a first glance, and owing
to their comical movements, might well have been taken for a herd of
apes. Now, like those animals, they leaped the hedges and bushes, and
then, like snakes, wound along the ground, or rolled down the river bank
with a rapidity of motion that the eye could scarcely follow. Further on
in the village were seen lads of a maturer age, practising warlike games
and exercises. They were performing the spy-dance. Whilst one party
crept stealthily over the grass, others lay upon the ground in a
listening posture, and with their ears pressed to the earth, strove to
distinguish the movements of their antagonists. At last, when the two
parties had approached each other, they sprang suddenly up, and forming
themselves in Indian file, commenced a combat in which they dealt
furious blows with their blunt wooden tomahawks, exhibiting in every
movement an extraordinary degree of activity and natural grace. Little
interest was shown in these evolutions by the adult inhabitants of the
village, whose extreme apathy and indifference contrasted curiously with
the display of violent exertion on the part of the young Indians. Before
the open doors of the huts sat the squaws and their daughters, stripping
the maize from the ear, beating hemp, or picking tobacco; the children,
who, according to Indian custom, are from their very birth kept in an
upright posture, hanging against the outer walls on long concave boards
or pieces of bark, to which their hands and feet were fastened by thongs
of buffalo hide, their only garment a strip of calico round the hips.

At a short distance from the upper part of the clearing stood two wooden
huts, which might have passed for two of the school or meeting-houses
often met with in the American backwoods. Like the other dwellings
composing the hamlet, they were propped against sycamore-trees, but they
were distinguished by their larger dimensions and more careful style of
building, by the bowers of palm and mangrove that surrounded them, and
the plots of smooth turf before their doors. In front of one of these
little houses, and in the centre of the lawn, about fifty men were
squatted upon the ground, enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke,
proceeding from tobacco-pipes, three to five feet in length,