cret and
teach it one another."

Thomas Lechford in his "Plain Dealing; or Newes from New England,"
London, 1642, says: "They are of complexion swarthy and tawny; their
children are borne white, but they bedawbe them with oyle and colors
presently."

The men are described as tall, straight, and of comely proportions;
no beards; hair black, coarse, and thick; noses broad, flat, and full
at the end; with big lips and wide mouths', yet nothing so unsightly
as the Moors; and the women as having "handsome limbs, slender arms,
pretty hands, and when they sing they have a pleasant tange in their
voices. The men shaved their hair on the right side, the women
acting as barbers, and left the hair full length on the left side,
with a lock an ell long." A Puritan divine--"New England's
Plantation, 1630"--says of the Indians about him, "their hair is
generally black, and cut before like our gentlewomen, and one lock
longer than the rest, much like to our gentlemen, which fashion I
think came from hence into England."

Their love of ornaments is sufficiently illustrated by an extract
from Strachey, which is in substance what Smith writes:

"Their eares they boare with wyde holes, commonly two or three, and
in the same they doe hang chaines of stayned pearle braceletts, of
white bone or shreeds of copper, beaten thinne and bright, and wounde
up hollowe, and with a grate pride, certaine fowles' legges, eagles,
hawkes, turkeys, etc., with beasts clawes, bears, arrahacounes,
squirrells, etc. The clawes thrust through they let hang upon the
cheeke to the full view, and some of their men there be who will
weare in these holes a small greene and yellow-couloured live snake,
neere half a yard in length, which crawling and lapping himself about
his neck oftentymes familiarly, he suffreeth to kisse his lippes.
Others weare a dead ratt tyed by the tayle, and such like
conundrums."

This is the earliest use I find of our word "conundrum," and the
sense it bears here may aid in discovering its origin.

Powhatan is a very large figure in early Virginia history, and
deserves his prominence. He was an able and crafty savage, and made
a good fight against the encroachments of the whites, but he was no
match for the crafty Smith, nor the double-dealing of the Christians.
There is something pathetic about the close of his life, his sorrow
for the death of his daughter in a strange land, when he saw his
territories overrun by the invaders, from