ow converts to
Christianity, and making considerable advancement in civilisation and
knowledge of agriculture. Hunting and fishing, however, appear to be
their favourite pursuits: for these they leave the comfortable houses at
the Indian villages, and return at stated times to their forest haunts.
I believe it is generally considered that their numbers are diminishing,
and some tribes have become nearly if not totally extinct in the
Canadas*. The race is slowly passing away from the face of the earth, or
mingling by degrees with the colonists, till, a few centuries hence,
even the names of their tribes will scarcely remain to tell that they
once existed.

[* It is stated that the North-West Company had a census of all the
tribes, and that the whole Indian population of that immense continent
did not now exceed 100,000 souls. In a Parliamentary document of 1834,
the Indians of Lower Canada are estimated at 3,437, and those of Upper
Canada at 13,700, which latter number is stated to include those on the
shores of Lake Huron, and to the westward.-Ed.]

When next you send a box or parcel, let me have a few good tracts and
hymn-books; as they prize a gift of this sort extremely. I send you a
hymn, the one they sang to us in the wigwam; it is the Indian
translation, and written by the hunter, Peter's eldest son: he was
delighted when I told him I wanted him to copy it for me, that I might
send it across the seas to my own country, that English people might see
how well Indians could write.

[Illustration: Red-bird]

[Illustration: Blue-bird]

The hunchback Maquin has made me a miniature canoe of birch-bark, which
I send; you will prize it as a curiosity, and token of remembrance. The
red and black squirrel-skins are for Jane; the feather fans, and papers
of feathers, for Sarah. Tell the latter the next time I send a packet
home, she shall have specimens fit for stuffing of our splendid red-
bird, which, I am sure, is the Virginian nightingale; it comes in May or
April, and leaves us late in the summer: it exactly corresponds to a
stuffed Virginian nightingale that I saw in a fine collection of
American birds. The blue-bird is equally lovely, and migrates much about
the same time; the plumage is of a celestial blue; but I have never seen
one otherwise than upon the wing, so cannot describe it minutely. The
cross-bills are very pretty; the male and female quite opposite in
colour, one having a lovely mixture of scarlet an