318 TRAVEL, ADVENTUEE, AND SPORT. 



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, accord- 

 ing 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 dis- 

 tinguished by their larger dimensions and more care- 

 ful 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, en- 

 veloped in a thick cloud of smoke, proceeding from 

 tobacco-pipes three to five feet in length, with which 

 all of them were provided. They were attired in 

 hunting-shirts, open in front, and showing the naked 

 breast down to the wampum girdle, to which a second 

 garment, reaching to the knee, was attached. Instead 

 of the shaved head and scalping-tuft adopted by many 

 Indian tribes, they wore the whole of their hair. 



