bark
canoes, but that the canoes were "dug-outs"--trunks of tall trees
burnt and chipped till they were hollowed into a narrow vessel of
considerable length.]

Champlain describes the wigwams or native huts as being cone-shaped,
heavily thatched with reeds, with an opening at the top of the roof
for the smoke to escape. Inside the huts was a low bed raised a foot
from the ground and made of short posts driven into the ground, with a
surface made of boards split from trees. On these boards were laid
either the dressed skins of deer or bear, or thick mattresses made of
reeds or rushes. The beds were large enough for several people to lie
on. Champlain describes the huts as being full of fleas, and likewise
the persons of the nearly naked Indians, who carried these fleas out
with them into the fields when they were working, so that the
Frenchmen by stopping to talk to the natives became covered with
fleas to such an extent that they were obliged to change their
clothes.

In the fields were cultivated not only maize, but beans similar to the
beans grown by the natives of Brazil, vegetable marrows or pumpkins,
Jerusalem artichokes[15], radishes, and tobacco. The woods were filled
with oaks, walnut trees[16], and the red "cedar" of North America,
really a very large juniper, the foliage of which in the summertime
often assumes a reddish colour, together with the trunk. This
Virginian juniper or "red cedar" is now quite a common tree in
England. In warm weather it exhales a delicious aromatic scent.

[Footnote 15: This tuber, which is a well-known and very useful
vegetable in England, comes from the root of a species of sunflower
(_Helianthus tuberosus_). It has nothing to do with the real
artichoke, which is a huge and gorgeous thistle, and it has equally
nothing to do with Jerusalem. The English people have always taken a
special delight in mispronouncing and corrupting words in order to
produce as much confusion as possible in their names for things.
Jerusalem is a corruption of _Girasole_, which is the Italian name
given to this sunflower with the edible roots, because its flower is
supposed always to turn towards the sun. The Jerusalem artichoke was
originally a native of North America.]

[Footnote 16: These walnut trees were afterwards known in modern
American speech as hickories, butter-nuts, and pig-nuts, all of which
are allied to, but distinct from, the European walnut.]

All these natives of the Massachusetts