The clothing of the Abipones is the chief employment of the women, who are commendable for their assiduity, and almost avidity in labour: for not to mention the daily business of the house, they shear sheep, spin the wool very neatly, dye it beautifully, by the aid of alum, with any colours they may have at hand, and afterwards weave it into cloth, adorned with a great number of lines and figures, and with a variety of colours. You would take it for a Turkey carpet, worthy of noblemen's houses in Europe. The loom and the instruments of which it consists are confined to a few reeds and sticks. The American women seem to have a natural talent for making various useful articles. They can mould pots and jugs of various forms of clay, not with the assistance of a turning machine, like potters, but with their hands alone. These clay vessels they bake, not in an oven, but out of doors, placing sticks round them. They cannot glaze them with lead, but they first dye them of a red colour, and then rub them with a kind of glue to make them shine. There is never any snow, and very little frost, in the region inhabited by the Abipones: but when the South wind blows hard, the air becomes very piercing, and sometimes intolerably so to persons thinly clad. The Abipones shield themselves from the cold with a cloak made of otters' skins. This garment, which is likewise square, is laboriously and elegantly made by the women: whose business it is to strip off the skins of the otters, after they have been caught by dogs, and then fix them to the ground with very slender pegs, that they may not wrinkle. After being dried, they are painted red, in square lines like a dice box. The Indian women cannot dress hides like curriers, but after having well rubbed and softened them with their hands, they sew them with a very thin thread, with so much skill, that the seams escape the quickest eye, and the whole cloak looks like one skin. For needles they use very small thorns, with which they pierce the otters' skins, as shoemakers do leather with an awl, so that the slender thread of the caraquatà can be passed through it. This cloak is commonly used both by men and women, when the air is cold; but the old people of both sexes will not part with a hair of these otters' skins, even in the hottest weather. Some of the poorer sort appear clothed in the skins of stags, does, and tigers. All the Americans, who are not entirely devoid of modesty, cover themselves with skins to keep out the cold. Others substitute, or wear in addition, the many coloured feathers of birds, sewed together with singular art; but this is more for the sake of adorning than of covering the body. The savages who inhabit the mountains, generally make threads of the caraquatá, or of the bark of the tree pinô, with which they weave a kind of cloth to serve in part for a covering. The Abiponian widows, whilst they mourn for their husbands, cover their shorn heads and their