98 ON SNOW-SHOES 'TO THE BARREN GROUNDS 



number of virtuous girls is very small, and wise indeed is 

 the son who knows his father in this vale of unconvention- 

 ality. The dead used to be swung in trees or hung from 

 four posts, where the wind rocked them in their eternal 

 sleep ; now they are buried in shallow graves, and the 

 wolverene guards them by day and feeds on them by 

 night. 



Priests have not yet taught the Indians the Golden 

 Rule, nor implanted respect for virginity. Chastity is re- 

 garded as a virtue to be honored in the breach rather than 

 in the observance, and fidelity seems by no means essen- 

 tial to the happiness of wedded life. 



The birth of "such a little one" to the unmarried girl 

 is no barrier to her marital prospects, and wifely faithless- 

 ness never leads to any passage at arms more serious than 

 a little hair pulling. Nor are the dispositions of these 

 people amatory. 



The men are impelled by that instinct of conquest which 

 rules in the male the world over, and makes of him an 

 iconoclastic and a selfish brute. 



The women, in their low plane of semi -civilization, 

 know nothing of nature's or cupid's mating, and yields 

 from love of gain rather than from warmth of constitu- 

 tion. 



These people have not ventured far into civilization. 

 Take from the Indian his copper kettle, steel knife, and 

 3O-bore muzzle-loading gun, in which he uses ball in 

 winter and shot in summer, and give him his bow, his 

 birch-bark " rogan," moose-bone, beaver-tooth, and flint- 

 stone knives, and he is just about where he was when the 

 Hudson's Bay Company brought the trinkets of the great 

 world to him. Agricultural knowledge is of no use to 

 him, because his country is not susceptible of cultivation, 

 except in a few rare and isolated spots. And there are 



