e
heads of assailants. It was a mode of fortification practised by all the
tribes speaking dialects of the Iroquois.

The voyagers entered the narrow portal. Within, they saw some fifty of
those large oblong dwellings so familiar in after years to the eyes of
the Jesuit apostles in Iroquois and Huron forests. They were about fifty
yards in length, and twelve or fifteen wide, framed of sapling poles
closely covered with sheets of bark, and each containing several fires
and several families. In the midst of the town was an open area, or
public square, a stone's throw in width. Here Cartier and his
followers stopped, while the surrounding houses of bark disgorged their
inmates,--swarms of children, and young women and old, their infants
in their arms. They crowded about the visitors, crying for delight,
touching their beards, feeling their faces, and holding up the
screeching infants to be touched in turn. The marvellous visitors,
strange in hue, strange in attire, with moustached lip and bearded chin,
with arquebuse, halberd, helmet, and cuirass, seemed rather demigods
than men.

Due time having been allowed for this exuberance of feminine rapture,
the warriors interposed, banished the women and children to a distance,
and squatted on the ground around the French, row within row of swarthy
forms and eager faces, "as if," says Cartier, "we were going to act a
play." Then appeared a troop of women, each bringing a mat, with which
they carpeted the bare earth for the behoof of their guests. The
latter being seated, the chief of the nation was borne before them on a
deerskin by a number of his tribesmen, a bedridden old savage, paralyzed
and helpless, squalid as the rest in his attire, and distinguished only
by a red fillet, inwrought with the dyed quills of the Canada porcupine,
encircling his lank black hair. They placed him on the ground at
Cartier's feet and made signs of welcome for him, while he pointed
feebly to his powerless limbs, and implored the healing touch from
the hand of the French chief. Cartier complied, and received in
acknowledgment the red fillet of his grateful patient. Then from
surrounding dwellings appeared a woeful throng, the sick, the lame, the
blind, the maimed, the decrepit, brought or led forth and placed on the
earth before the perplexed commander, "as if," he says, "a god had
come down to cure them." His skill in medicine being far behind the
emergency, he pronounced over his petitioners a p