284 THE MAIDU. 
mold, accumulated from the leavings of years. They seem sometimes to 
live on these spots, off and on, so long that they become foul and unwhole- 
some from the exhalations (for they are not nice, and use no disinfectants) ; 
then they abandon them, and years elapse before they camp on them again. 
Sometimes, and perhaps more frequently, they abandon them on account 
of deaths, though these deaths may have been caused by noxious effluvia. 
A few words will suffice to describe a hamlet. It stands on a gentle 
knoll beside a small, living stream, the bed of which is a dense jungle of 
willows and aquatic weeds. Back of the village the low, rounded hills 
spread away in the arid, sweltering air, tawny-colored, and crisped in the 
pitiless drought, with here and there a wisp of faded poison-oak, or a clump 
of evergreen chaparral, or a low, leaden-green, thin-haired silver-pine, 
scarcely able to cast a shadow in the fierce, blinding glare of a California 
summer. Crowning the knoll, the dome-shaped assembly or dance house 
swells broadly up—a barbaric temple—in the middle of the hamlet, and an 
Indian is occasionally seen passing on all-fours in or out the low arched 
entrance ; hard by which stands a solitary white-oak, that swings its circling 
shadow over the village. Half a dozen conical, smoke-blackened lodges 
are scattered over the knoll, each with its open side on the north to protect 
the inmates from the sunshine, and rude wickiups or brush-awnings stretch 
raggedly from one to another, or are thrown out as wings on either side. 
One or more acorn-granaries of wicker-work stand around each lodge, 
much like hogsheads in shape and size, either on the ground or mounted 
on posts as high as one’s head, full of acorns, and capped with thatch. 
Drowse, drowse, mope, is the order of the hour. All through the long 
sweltering days there is not a sound in the hamlet unless it is the eternal 
thump, thump of some squaw pounding up acorns. Within the heavily- 
earthed assembly-house it is cool and dark, and here the men lie on the 
earth-floor with their heads pillowed on the low bank around the side; but 
the women do not enter, for it is forbidden to them except on festival days. 
They and the children find the coolest places they can outside. The 
younger Indians are mostly dressed in clothing in which it is possible to 
recognize the civilized cut and fit; the old men, if the weather is not im- 
moderately hot, wear mostly assemblages of picked-up raiment; but the old 
