GLIMPSES OF SOCIAL LIFE. A 
Notwithstanding their occasional ebullitions of brutality toward women 
and children, they are a race with strong affections. William Burgett relates 
that he has frequently seen them carry the aged long distances on their 
backs to bring them to a physician. An Indian employed by him once lest 
a cousin to whom he was much attached; and he wept and mourned for him 
daily for more than six months, refusing food to such a degree that he was 
reduced to a living skeleton. An aged Achomawi lost his wife, to whom 
he had been married probably half a century, and he tarred his face in 
mourning for her as though he were a woman—an act totally unpre- 
cedented, and regarded by the Indians as evincing an extraordinary affection. 
A woman speaking good English gave me some interesting glimpses 
of Indian social life on Pit River. An Achomawi mother seldom teaches 
her daughters any of the arts of barbaric housekeeping before their mar- 
riage. They learn them by imitation and experiment after they grow old 
enough to perceive the necessity thereof. The parents are expected to 
establish a young couple in their lodge, provide them with the needful 
basketry, and furnish them with cooked food for some months, which 
indulgent parents sometimes continue for a year, or even longer, so that 
the young people have a more real honeymoon than is vouchsafed to most 
civilized people. As children are taught nothing, so they are never pun- 
ished, but occasionally cuffed or banged. It is a wonder that they grow 
up with any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their 
presence is often of the filthiest description. But the children of savages 
far less often make wreck of body and soul than do those of the civilized, 
because when the great mystery of maturity confronts them they know 
what it means and how to meet it. 
In case of the birth of twins one is almost always destroyed, for the 
feeling is universal that two little mouths at once are too great a burden. 
Infanticide seems to prevail in no other instance but this. It is a singular 
fact that the Indians generally have no word for “milk”. They never see 
it, for they never extract it from any animal, because that would seem to 
them a kind of sacrilege or robbery of the young. Hence, an Indian fre- 
quently sees this article for the first time among civilized people, and adopts 
the Spanish word for it. 
