e, she
promised to give me the _next_ one! It is a Kanaka custom to make a
present to the person calling upon them for the first time, in
accordance with which habit I received a pair of dove-colored boots
three sizes too large for me.

I should have liked to visit the Indian encampment which lies a few
miles from The Junction, but was too much fatigued to attempt it. The
Indians often visit us, and as they seldom wear anything but a _very_
tight and _very_ short shirt, they have an appearance of being, as
Charles Dickens would say, all legs. They usually sport some kind of a
head-dress, if it is nothing more than a leather string, which they
bind across their dusky brows in the style of the wreaths in Norma, or
the gay ribbons garlanding the hair of the Roman youth in the play of
Brutus. A friend of ours, who has visited their camp several times, has
just given me a description of their mode of life. Their huts, ten or
twelve in number, are formed of the bark of the pine, conically shaped,
plastered with mud, and with a hole in the top, whence emerges the
smoke, which rises from a fire built in the center of the apartment.
These places are so low that it is quite impossible to stand upright in
them, and are entered from a small hole in one side, on all fours. A
large stone, sunk to its surface in the ground, which contains three or
four pan-like hollows for the purpose of grinding acorns and nuts, is
the only furniture which these huts contain. The women, with another
stone, about a foot and a half in length and a little larger than a
man's wrist, pulverize the acorns to the finest possible powder, which
they prepare for the table(?) in the following manner. Their cooking
utensils consist of a kind of basket, woven of some particular species
of reed, I should fancy, from the descriptions which I have had of
them, and are so plaited as to be impervious to fluids. These they fill
half full of water, which is made to boil by placing in it hot stones.
The latter they drag from the fire with two sticks. When the water
boils, they stir into it, until it is about as thick as hasty-pudding,
the powdered acorns, delicately flavored with dried grasshoppers, and
lo! dinner is ready. Would you like to know how they eat? They place
the thumb and little finger together across the palm of the hand, and
make of the other three fingers a spoon, with which they shovel into
their capacious mouths this delicious compound.

There are abo