Should any of the Indian women violate this law of purity, they would be censured, and suffer for any sudden sickness, or death that might happen among the people, as the necessary effect of the divine anger for their polluting sin, contrary to their old traditional law of female purity. Like the greater part of the Israelites, it is the fear of temporal evils, and the prospect of temporal good, that makes them so tenacious and observant of their laws. At the stated period, the Indian women’s impurity is finished by ablution, and they are again admitted to social and holy privileges. By the Levitical law, the people who had _running issues_, or _sores_, were deemed unclean, and strictly ordered apart from the rest, for fear of polluting them; for every thing they touched became unclean. The Indians, in as strict a manner, observe the very same law; they follow the ancient {124} Israelitish copy so close, as to build a small hut at a considerable distance from the houses of the village, for every one of their warriors wounded in war, and confine them there, (as the Jewish lepers formerly were, without the walls of the city) for the space of four moons, including that moon in which they were wounded, as in the case of their women after travel: and they keep them strictly separate, lest the impurity of the one should prevent the cure of the other. The reputed prophet, or divine physician, daily pays them a due attendance, always invoking YO HE WAH to bless the means they apply on the sad occasion; which is chiefly mountain allum, and medicinal herbs, always injoyning a very abstemious life, prohibiting them women and salt in particular, during the time of the cure, or sanctifying the reputed sinners. Like the Israelites, they firmly believe that safety, or wounds, &c. immediately proceed from the pleased, or angry deity, for their virtuous, or vicious conduct, in observing, or violating the divine law.