quarter"—meaning twenty-five cents. I took a
provision of small money with me—the newest
and brightest I could procure; but the mothers
of Cuagnawagha were that day in no mercenary
mood. At least, they did not actually beg for
money. They clapped their hands for joy, and
the papoose crowed in unison whenever we did
present them with a backshish; so that, on the
whole, in this lane full of copper-coloured babies
we had our money's worth and more. We would
no sooner halt at an open threshold than cheery
voices in an amazing jargon of French and
English, invited us to walk in. If we hesitated
about intruding, the inevitable papoose, tightly
swaddled and strapped on to a board, like a
diminutive Egyptian mummy, was handed to us
through the window. A gipsy woman of felonious
tendencies might have made a fortune in
ten minutes' perambulation of Cuagnawagha, by
running off with the papooses thus offered on
trust; only, as the gipsies are said to steal only
Nazarene children, and the Red Indians themselves
are by some ethnologists supposed to be
of kin with the gipsies, those Zingarini persons
might not have cared, perhaps, about stealing
their own flesh and blood.

I was given to understand afterwards that
these Indians of Cuagnawagha were a very
industrious and well-to-do community. The men
hunted and fished, and were boatmen and river
pilots; the women stayed at home, took care
of the papooses, and filled up their time by
making baskets and creels, and embroidering
those exquisite moccasins, slippers, pouches,
fans, wampam belts, and other articles of bead
and feather work which are so much in request
in the fancy bazaars of Montreal and Quebec,
and for which the retail dealers charge such
exorbitant prices. The squaws of Cuagnawagha
have certain market days for the disposal of
their manufactories. On these occasions they
are conveyed by their lords in canoes of birch
bark across the river, and may be seen, with
their black hair abundantly oiled, and their
persons spruced up in infinite Indian finery,
gliding from shop to shop in the most
frequented streets of Montreal, in strange
contrast to the European costumes around them.
I did not hear that the Indians of Cuagnawagha,
male or female, were much given to the
consumption of fire-water, or to quarrelling or
pilfering, or to the other generic weaknesses of
the noble savage when in a state of free nobility
and nastiness. I did not see any liquor-shop
in the place. The domestic affairs of the
village are administered by a chief—John or
Peter, or Big Bellows or Bear's Paw, was, I
think, his name—but it does not matter now—
who was reported to have done uncommonly
well in the fur trade, and to be worth many
dollars. I had the honour of an interview with
this Sachem, who was sitting, after the manner
of his subjects, at his open door, in a Windsor
chair, and smoking the calumet of peace—an
ordinary tobacco-pipe, containing, as I was led
to infer from the odour, birdseye. He was old,
and immensely fat, but very affable. He showed
me a pair of the most beautifully embroidered
moccasins I had ever beheld. Not to mince the
matter, they served as coverings to his own
stout legs and feet; but nothing could exceed
the courteous manner in which he cocked up
his bead-worked limbs on the window-sill, and
allowed me narrowly to inspect, and even to
smooth and pat them. The Sachem's house was
so full of chattels that it looked like a broker's
shop; and the name of his tea-tray was legion.
He wore on his breast, and was evidently
exceedingly proud of, a silver medal, bearing the
effigy of King George the Fourth, and had, so
far as I could make out, served at some remote
period in the local militia. He had the usual
twin engravings over his mantelpiece—the
Madonna and the Queen of England, and was a
staunch Conservative and a devout Roman
Catholic. So I left him, never to behold him
more, in this semi-ignored corner of the world,
so close to civilisation, and yet so far from it.
He was sitting under his own vine and his own
fig-tree; and who was there to make him afraid?
Not the British Government, surely, whose rule
over these honest folks is mild, and equitable,
and protective; not the Pope of Rome,
assuredly. In Lower Canada, the Roman
Catholic religion seems to have lost the
terrifying character which it is apt to assume
elsewhere. The priest neither bullies, nor
teases, nor grinds the faces of his parishioners.
He is their master; for he is lawyer, arbitrator,
journalist, schoolmaster, letter-writer, match-
maker, guide, philosopher and friend, all in one;
but his spiriting seems to be done with infinite
gentleness, and he is certainly beloved by a
population who, but for his quietly paternal
despotism, would very likely be drunken, and
savage, and profligate, and not peaceable, and
affectionate, and docile.

At one extremity of the village street there was
a church, a bare structure of considerable
antiquity, highly whitewashed. The irregular area
before this edifice seemed to be the general
trysting-place of the young squaws and the
young braves of Cuagnawagha, who were sweet-
hearting after the manner of young squaws and
young braves the whole world over. The
braves, I am sorry to say, had repudiated the
slightest approach to Indian costume, and in
the round blue jackets and glazed hats which
they mostly affected, had somewhat of a sailor-
like-appearance. They were pure redskins,
however, and half-castes were rare. Now a Red
Indian in a blue jacket and a round glazed hat
sounds rather anomalous and incongruous.
Where were the feathers, and the war-paint,
and the tattooing? Not at Cuaguawagha,
certainly. You must go much further west if you
wish to see the noble savage in his full native
splendour and squalor; and even in the wildest
districts the Indian rarely fails to supply himself
with a European outfit whenever he has an
opportunity to do so. I remember a hard-
hearted, but withal very amusing speculator
from down East, telling me of a gambling
transaction he had had with an Indian somewhere in
the territory of Colorado. "The cuss," he observed,
"had been tradin' hosses, and bought a