994 THE PATWIN. 
ble collapse with advancing years. The watery and unsubstantial nature 
of their food doubtless has something to do with this; and it is this phe- 
nomenal shrinkage which causes them to become so hideously wrinkled and 
repulsive. I have seen nonagenarians who it seemed to me would scarcely 
weigh fifty pounds. An aged squaw of the Sacramento, with her hair close 
cropped, the wrinkles actually gathered in folds on the face, and smutched 
with blotches of tar, the face so little and weasened, and the blinking, 
pinched eyes, is probably the most odious-looking of human beings. On 
the other hand, take a Patwin girl of the mountains, at that climacteric when 
she is just gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of youth, her com- 
plexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide eyes dreamy and idle, and she pre- 
sents a not unattractive type of vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty. 
Klaity, the chief of the Lolsel, was turning white in spots. The 
process had been going forward slowly for several years—he was probably 
over eighty years old—not by any sloughing off, but by an imperceptible 
change from black to a soft, delicate white. The old captain appeared to 
be rather proud of the change than otherwise, hoping eventually to become 
a white man. When asked by the interpreter where he expected to go after 
death, he replied that he did not know, but he was going to follow the 
Americans wherever they went. 
From the above descriptions, it will be guessed that the Patwin rank 
among the lowest of the race. Antonio told me that his people who could 
not speak English had no name or conception whatever of a Supreme 
Being, and never mentioned the subject, and that they never spoke of 
religion, a future state, or anything of the kind. But this must be taken 
cum grano salis. The Lolsel speak of a divinity whom they call Kem’-mi 
Sal-to (the white man of the clouds), but this is too manifestly a modern 
invention made to please their patron, Hanson. 
Neither have they any ceremony that can be ealled worship. They 
have dances or merrymakings (p0-noh) in celebration of a good harvest of 
acorns or a plentiful catch of fish. he Patwin have a ceremony of raising 
the dead, and another of raising the devil, but both are employed for 
sordid purposes. The former was in early times used merely to keep the 
women in subjection, but now merely to extort from them the gains of the 
prostitution to which they are foreed by their own husbands and brothers! 
