HUMAN CAVE-DWELLERS. 15 



HUMAN CAVE-DWELLEES. 



HOW THEY LIVED. 



There is an old story of an Indian who, being 

 asked how he could endure severe weather without 

 clothing, replied that white men exposed their un- 

 covered faces to the cold without discomfort, and that 

 an Indian's body is all face. The primitive man has 

 little use for furnace-heated rooms from which all 

 fresh air is excluded, or for garments to bind and 

 constrain the free movement of body or limb. His 

 house is often as slight and temporary as the nests of 

 some of the birds or the lairs of beasts, and however 

 much we may despise him for going unclothed and liv- 

 ing in rude huts, it can not be better to have to depend 

 upon elaborate and expensive dwellings and garments, 

 and all sorts of artificial protection from the climate 

 in which we live, to make us comfortable. 



The simplest huts constructed by savages are invis- 

 ible, and confer the same property upon those who in- 

 habit them. It sometimes happens that all the men of 

 a tribe of native Australians leave their women and 

 children and go off on an expedition, perhaps to 

 attack some neighboring tribe. " These," says a 

 writer on the subject, " knowing they might be 

 pounced upon by enemies who would take advantage 

 of the absence of their defenders, retire into the re- 

 cesses of the woods, where they build the oddest 



