happened as easily a thousand years ago as a hundred. It is certain that some men among the Mound-Builders had reached the sea in their travels; for on some of their carved pipes there are representations of the seal and of the manati, or sea-cow, animals which they

could only have seen by travelling very far to the east or west, or else by descending the Mississippi River to its mouth. But we know neither whence they came nor whither they went. Very few human bones have been found among the mounds; and those found had almost crumbled into dust. We only know that the MoundBuilders came, and built wonderful works, and then made way for another race, of whose origin we know almost as little.

such as Mohegans, Pequots, Massachusetts, Narra gansetts, Hurons, and Wampanoags. But they almost all belonged to two great families, the Algonquins and the Iroquois; these last being commonly called the "Six Nations." The Europeans named them all "In

dians," because all the first explorers supposed that North America was only the eastern part of India.

These tribes of natives differed very much, in some respects, as to their mode of life. Some were warlike, others peaceful. Some lived only by hunting: others had fields of waving corn, and raised also beans, pumpkins, tobacco, American hemp, and sunflowers, — these last for the oil in the seeds. Some had only little tents of skin or bark, called "wigwams :" others built permanent villages, with streets, and rows of houses. These houses were sometimes thirty feet high, and two hundred and forty feet long, and contained as many as twenty families. They were built of bark, supported by wooden posts: they had a slit, about a foot wide, the whole length of the roof, to let the light in, and the smoke out. The fires were built on the ground, in a row, under the long opening.

But, however carefully they may have built their houses, all these Indians were alike in being a roving race, living in the open air most of their time, and very unwilling to be long confined to one place. They were always moving about, changing their abode at different seasons of the year, or when they wished to pursue a different kind of game. One of their commonest reasons for removing was that they had burned the woods immediately around them. So when the first white settlers came, and the Indians were puzzled to know why these strangers arrived, some of them thought that it must be because they had burned up all the wood in the country from which they came, and that they visited the American continent merely to find fuel.

The Indians were not commonly equal to the Euro

peans in bodily strength: they were not so strong in the arms and hands, nor could they strike such heavy blows. But, on the other hand, their endurance was wonderful. They were very light of foot, and their best runners could run seventy or eighty miles in a day; and they could bear the greatest torture without uttering a groan. In the woods they could hear sounds, and observe signs, which no white man could perceive; and they had the power of travelling for miles in a straight line through the densest forest, being guided by the appearance of the moss and bark upon the trees.

When the colonists first arrived, they found the Indians dressed chiefly in the skins of animals, which they prepared by smoking them, instead of by tanning, as is now the practice. But they soon obtained blankets from the colonists, and decorated them with beads and shells and feathers. On great occasions, such as councils and war-dances, the chiefs wore a great quantity of these decorations, and also painted their faces with bright colors. The women, or "squaws as they were called, had this same practice; and one old Puritan clergyman wrote with great indignation, "The squaws use the sinful art of painting their faces." The women were more plainly dressed than the men, and, like them, sometimes tattooed their bodies. But the women wore their hair long, while the men commonly shaved theirs off, except one lock, called the "scalp-lock," which was left as a point of honor; so that, if one Indian killed another, he could cut off the scalp, lifting it by this lock. In summer they went about almost naked; and one of the first white settlers complained that it was hard fighting hand to hand with an Indian, because

there was "nothing to hold on by but his hair," and not much of that.

The food of the Indians was very simple: it consisted of what they obtained by hunting and fishing, with pounded corn, acorns, berries, and a few vegetables. They used tobacco, but had no intoxicating drinks till they got them from Europeans. They knew how to make rush mats and wooden mortars and earthen vessels. They made fish-hooks of bone, and nets out of the fibres of hemp. They made pipes of clay and stone, often curiously carved or moulded. They made stone axes and arrow-heads; and these are often found in the ground to this day, wherever there is the site of an Indian village; and they made beads, called "wampum," out of shells. After the Europeans came,

in with a net-work of deer's hide.

they supplied the Indians with their own beads, and with iron axes and arrowheads, and, at last, with fire-arms.

But the most ingenious inventions of the Indians were the snow-shoe and the birch canoe. The snow-shoe was made of a maple-wood frame, three or four feet long, curved and tapering, and filled

This net-work was