scale the fence. The town
was entered by only one doorway, and contained about fifty houses
surrounding an open space whereon the towns-people made their
bonfires. Each house was about 50 feet long by 12 to 15 feet wide.
They were roofed with bark, and usually had attics which were
storerooms for food. In the centre of each of these long houses there
was a fireplace where the cooking for the whole of the house
inhabitants was done. Each family had its own room, but each house
probably contained five families. Almost the only furniture, except
cooking pots, was mats on which the people sat and slept. The food of
the people consisted, besides fish and the flesh of beavers and deer,
of maize and beans. Cartier at once recognized the maize or Indian
corn as the same grain ("a large millet") as that which he had seen in
Brazil.

He gives a description of how they made the maize into bread (or
rather "dampers", "ashcakes"); but as this is not altogether clear, it
is better to combine it with Champlain's description, written a good
many years later, but still at a time when the Hurons were unaffected
by the white man's civilization. According to both Cartier and
Champlain, the women pounded the corn to meal in a wooden mortar, and
removed the bran by means of fans made of the bark of trees. From this
meal they made bread, sometimes mixing with the meal the beans
(_Phaseolus vulgaris_), which had been boiled and mashed. Or they
would boil both Indian corn and beans into a thick soup, adding to the
soup blueberries,[6] dried raspberries, or pieces of deer's fat. The
meal derived from the corn and beans they would make into bread,
baking it in the ashes.

[Footnote 6: The Canada Blueberry (_Vaccinium canadense_), called by
the French _blues_ or _bluets_. These blues were collected and dried
by the Amerindians, and made a sweet nutriment for eating in the
winter.]

Or they would take the pounded Indian corn without removing the bran,
and put two or three handfuls of it into an earthen pot full of water,
stirring it from time to time, when it boiled, so that it might not
adhere to the pot. To this was added a small quantity of fish, fresh
or dry, according to the season, to give a flavour to the _migane_ or
porridge. When the dried fish was used the porridge smelt very badly
in the nostrils of Europeans, but worst of all when the porridge was
mixed with dried venison, which was sometimes nearly putrid! If fish
was put into th