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was due to the character of their rain.
Wheat or rye would have been a useless gift to the
Indian, who had neither plough nor sickle.
The maize springs luxuriantly from a warm, new field, and in the rich soil, with little aid from culture, outstrips the weeds; bears, not thirty, not fifty, but a thousand fold; if once dry, is hurt neither by heat nor cold; may be preserved in a pit or a cave for years, ay, and for centuries; is gathered from the field by the hand, without knife or reaping-hook; and becomes nutritious food by a simple roasting before a fire.
A little of its parched meal, with water from the brook, was often a dinner and supper; and the warrior, with a small supply of it in a basket at his back, or in a leathern girdle, and with his bow and arrows, is ready for travel at a mo ment's warning.
The tobacco-plant was not forgotten; and the cultivation of the vine which we have learned of them to call the squash, with beans, completed their husbandry.
During the mild season, there may have been little suffering.
But thrift was wanting; the stores collected by the industry of the women were squandered in
festivities. The hospitality of the
Indian has rarely
been questioned.
The stranger enters his cabin, by day or by night, without asking leave, and is enter-
tained as freely as a thrush or a blackbird that regales himself on the luxuries of the fruitful grove.
He will take his own rest abroad, that he may give up his own skin or mat of sedge to his guest.
Nor is the traveller questioned as to the purpose of his visit; he chooses his own time freely to deliver his message.
Festivals, too, were common, at some of which it was the rule to eat every thing that was offered; and the indulgence of appetite surpassed belief.
But what could be more miserable than the tribes of the north and north-west,