i.e., a bundle of rags, a stick
with a bit of cloth wrapped about it, or something that serves just as
well as this. The children build little houses for their dolls and name
them "camps." Boys take their bows and arrows and go into the bushes and
kill small birds, and on returning say they have been "turkey-hunting."
Children sit around a small piece of land and, sticking blades of grass
into the ground, name it a "corn field." They have the game of "hide and
seek." They use the dancing rope, manufacture a "see-saw," play "leap
frog," and build a "merry-go-round." Carrying a small stick, they say
they carry a rifle. I noticed some children at play one day sitting near
a dried deer skin, which lay before them stiff and resonant. They had
taken from the earth small tubers about an inch in diameter found on the
roots of a kind of grass and called "deer-food." Through them they had
thrust sharp sticks of the thickness of a match and twice as long,
making what we would call "teetotums." These, by a quick twirl between
the palms of the hands, were set to spinning on the deer skin. The four
children were keeping a dozen or more of these things going. The sport
they called "a dance."

I need only add that the relations among the various members of the
Indian family in Florida are, as a rule, so well adjusted and observed
that home life goes on without discord. The father is beyond question
master in his home. To the mother belongs a peculiar domestic importance
from her connection with her gens, but both she and her children seek
first to know and to do the will of the actual lord of the household.
The father is the master without being a tyrant; the mother is a subject
without being a slave; the children have not yet learned self-assertion
in opposition to their parents: consequently, there is no constraint in
family intercourse. The Seminole household is cheerful, its members are
mutually confiding, and, in the Indian's way, intimate and affectionate.

The Seminole Gens.

Of this larger body of kindred, existing, as I could see, in very
distinct form among the Seminole, I gained but little definite
knowledge. What few facts I secured are here placed on record.

After I was enabled to make my inquiry understood, I sought to learn
from my respondent the name of the gens to which each Indian whose name
I had received belonged. As the result, I found that the two hundred and
eight Seminole now in Florida are divided into t