THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH. 
183 
three times repeated, somewhat like the peep of the hy- 
lodes, but not so loud. In answer to my inquiries, he said 
that he had never seen them while making it, but go¬ 
ing to the spot he finds the snake. This, he said on 
another occasion, was a sign of rain. When I had se¬ 
lected this place for our camp, he had remarked that 
there were snakes there, — he saw them. But they won’t 
do any hurt, I said. “ 0 no,” he answered, “just as you 
say, it makes no difference to me.” 
He lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he 
said, he was partly deaf in one ear, and he wanted to 
lie with his good ear up. As we lay there, he inquired 
if I ever heard “ Indian sing.” I replied that I had not 
often, and asked him if he would not favor us with a 
song. He readily assented, and lying on his back, with 
his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, 
somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his own language, 
which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the 
Catholic missionaries. He translated it to us, sentence by 
sentence, afterward, wishing to see if we could remember 
it. It proved to be a very simple religious exercise or 
hymn, the burden of which was, that there was only 
one God who ruled all the world. This was hammered 
(or sung) out very thin, so that some stanzas wellnigh 
meant nothing at all, merely keeping up the idea. He 
then said that he would sing us a Latin song; but we did 
not detect any Latin, only one or two Greek words in it, 
— the rest may have been Latin with the Indian pronun¬ 
ciation. 
His singing carried me back to*the period of the dis¬ 
covery of America, to San Salvador and the Incas, when 
Europeans first encountered the simple faith of the In¬ 
dian. There was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; 
