dried at the mysterious fire, and even the guts of which the strings are made. But you are here to observe, I am speaking of an incident that happened some years ago; for, generally speaking, they are now better provided with arms, and iron, by the Europeans supplying them, for their chace, in favor of their dealings with them for their peltry. But to return to my narration.

Whilst the fire is still burning, the women come like so many furies, with more than bacchanalian madness, making the most hideous howlings, and dancing without any order, round the fire. Then all their apparent rage turns of a sudden against the men. They threaten them, that if they do not supply them with scalps, they will hold them very cheap, and look on them as greatly inferior to themselves; that they will deny themselves to their most lawful pleasures; that their daughters shall be given to none but such as have signalized themselves by some military feat; that, in short, they will themselves find means to be revenged of them, which cannot but be easy to do on cowards.

The men, at this, begin to parley with one another, and order the women to withdraw, telling them, that they shall be satisfied; and that, in a little time, they may expect to have prisoners brought to them, to do what they will with them.

The next thing they agree on is to send a couple of messengers, in the nature of heralds at arms, with their hatchets, quivers, bows, and arrows, to declare war against the nation by whom they conceive themselves aggrieved. These go directly to the village where the bulk of the nation resides, observing a sullen silence by the way, without speaking to any that may meet them. When they draw near the village, they give the earth several strokes with their hatchets, as a signal of commencing hostilities in form; and to confirm it the more, they shoot two of their best arrows at the village, and retire with the utmost expedition. The war is now kindled in good earnest, and it behoves each party to stand well on its guard. The heralds, after this, return to make a report of what they have done; and to prove their having been at the place appointed, they do not fail of bringing away with them some particular marks of that spot of the country. Then it is, that the inhabitants of each nation begin to think seriously, whether they shall maintain their ground by staying in their village, and fortifying it in their manner, or look out for a place of greater safety, or go directly in quest of the enemy. Upon these questions they assemble, deliberate, and hold endless consultations, though withal not uncurious ones: for it is on these occasions, that those of the greatest sagacity and eloquence display all their talents, and make themselves distinguished. One of their most common stratagems, when there were reasons for not attacking one another, or coming to a battle directly, was for one side to make as if they had renounced all thoughts of acting offensively. A party of those who made this feint of renunciation, would disperse itself in a wood, observing to keep near the borders of it; when, if any stragglers of the enemy's appeared, some one would counterfeit to the life the particular cry of that animal, in the imitation of which he most excelled; and this childish decoy would, however, often succeed, in drawing in the young men of the opposite party into their ambushes.

Sometimes the scheme was to examine what particular spot lay so, that the enemies must, in all necessity, pass through it, to hunt, or provide bark for making their canoes. It was commonly in these passes, or defiles, that the bloodiest encounters or engagements happened, when whole nations have been known to destroy one another, with such an exterminating rage on both sides, that few have been left alive on either; and to say the truth, they were, generally speaking, mere cannibals. It was rarely the case that they did not devour some limbs, at least, of the prisoners they made upon one another, after torturing them to death in the most cruel and shocking manner: but they never failed of drinking their blood like water; it is now, some time, that our Micmakis especially are no longer in the taste of exercising such acts of barbarity. I have, yet, lately myself seen amongst them some remains of that spirit of ferocity; some tendencies and approaches to those inhumanities; but they are nothing in comparison to what they used to be, and seem every day wearing out. The religion to which we have brought them over, and our remonstrances have greatly contributed to soften that savage temper, and atrocious vindictiveness that heretofore reigned amongst them. But remember, Sir, that as to this point I am now only speaking, upon my own knowlege, of the Micmakis and Mariquects, who, though different in language, have the same customs and manners, and are of the same way of thinking and acting.

But to arrive at any tolerable degree of conjecture, whence these people derive their origin own myself at a loss: possibly some light might be got into it, by discovering whether there was any affinity or not between their language, and that of the Orientalists, as the Chinese or Tartars. In the mean time, the abundance of words in this language surprized, and continues to surprize me every day the deeper I get into it. Every thing is proper in it; nothing borrowed, as amongst us. Here are no auxiliary verbs. The prepositions are in great number. This it is that gives great ease, fluency, and richness to the expression of whatever you require, when you are once master enough to join them to the verbs. In all their absolute verbs they have a dual number. What we call the imperfect, perfect, and preter-perfect tenses of the indicative mood, admits, as with us, of varied inflexions of the terminations to distinguish the person; but the difference of the three tenses is express, for the preter-perfect by the preposition Keetch; for the preter-pluperfect by Keetch Keeweeh: the imperfect is again distinguished from them by having no preposition at all.

They have no feminine termination, either for the verbs or nouns. This greatly facilitates to me my composition of songs and hymns for them, especially as their prose itself naturally runs into poetry, from the frequency of their tropes and metaphors; and into rhime, from their nouns being susceptible of the same termination, as that of the words in the verbs which express the different persons. In speaking of persons absent, the words change their termination, as well in the nouns as in the verbs.

They have two distinctions of style; the one noble, or elevated, for grave and important subjects, the other ignoble, or trivial, for familiar or vulgar ones. But this distinction is not so much with them, as with us, marked by a difference of words, but of terminations. Thus, when they are treating of solemn, or weighty matters, they terminate the verb and the noun by another inflexion, than what is used for trivial or common conversation.

I do not know, whether I explain clearly enough to you this so material a point of their elocution; but it makes itself clearly distinguished, when once one comes to understand the language, in which it supplies the place of the most pathetic emphasis, though even that they do not want, nor great expression in their gestures and looks. All their conjugations are regular and distinct.

Yet, with all these advantages of language, the nation itself is extreamly ignorant as to what concerns itself, or its origin, and their traditions are very confused and defective. They know nothing of the first peopling of their country, of which they imagine themselves the Aborigines. They often talk of their ancestors, but have nothing to say of them that is not vague or general. According to them, they were all great hunters, great wood-rangers, expert managers of canoes, intrepid warriors, that took to wives as many as they could maintain by hunting. They had too a custom amongst them, that if a woman grew pregnant whilst she was sucking a child, they obliged her to use means for