506 SEMINOLE INDIANS OF FLORIDA. 
seldem, too, he rises during the night and breaks his sleep by eating a 
piece of the roasting meat. The kettle and big spoon stand always 
ready for those who at any moment may hunger. There is little to be 
said about eating in a Seminole household, therefore, except that when 
its members eat together they make a kettle the center of their group 
and that much of their eating is done without reference to one another. 
AMUSEMENTS. 
But one sees the family at home, not only working and sleeping and 
eating, but also engaged in amusing itself. Especially among the chil- 
dren, various sports are indulged in. I took some trouble to learn what 
amusements the little Seminole had invented or received. I obtained 
a list of them which might as well be that of the white man’s as of the 
Indiaw’s child. The Seminole has a doll, 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, stick- 
ing 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 arifle. 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 ealled “deer- 
food.” Through them they had thrust shaip 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 fawily 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 im- 
portance 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. 


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