rk, which, Joe said, sang at a certain hour in the
night,--at ten o'clock, he believed. We also heard the hylodes and
tree-toads, and the lumberers singing in their camp a quarter of a
mile off. I told them that I had seen pictured in old books pieces of
human flesh drying on these crates; whereupon they repeated some
tradition about the Mohawks eating human flesh, what parts they
preferred, etc., and also of a battle with the Mohawks near Moosehead,
in which many of the latter were killed; but I found that they knew
but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by
stories about their ancestors as readily as any way. At first I was
nearly roasted out, for I lay against one side of the camp, and felt
the heat reflected not only from the birch-bark above, but from the
side; and again I remembered the sufferings of the Jesuit
missionaries, and what extremes of heat and cold the Indians were said
to endure. I struggled long between my desire to remain and talk with
them, and my impulse to rush out and stretch myself on the cool grass;
and when I was about to take the last step, Joe, hearing my murmurs,
or else being uncomfortable himself, got up and partially dispersed
the fire. I suppose that that is Indian manners,--to defend yourself.

While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with
trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper
name introduced. There can be no more startling evidence of their
being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race, than to hear this
unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor
understand. We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every
other particular, but the language which is so wholly unintelligible
to us. It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrow-heads,
and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians
and poets. It was a purely wild and primitive American sound, as much
as the barking of a _chickaree_, and I could not understand a
syllable of it; but Paugus, had he been there, would have understood
it. These Abenakis gossiped, laughed, and jested, in the language in
which Eliot's Indian Bible is written, the language which has been
spoken in New England who shall say how long? These were the sounds
that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born;
they have not yet died away; and, with remarkably few exceptions, the
language of their forefathers is