The inhabitants of this retired spot, although offering fewer charms than did their residence, were in many respects scarcely less interesting. In front of the foremost hut was assembled a group of creatures with dark shining skins, which, at a first glance, and owing to their comical movements, might well have been taken for a herd of apes. Now, like those animals, they leaped the hedges and bushes, and then, like snakes, wound along the ground, or rolled down the river bank with a rapidity of motion that the eye could scarcely follow. Further on in the village were seen lads of a maturer age, practising warlike games and exercises. They were performing the spy-dance. Whilst one party crept stealthily over the grass, others lay upon the ground in a listening posture, and with their ears pressed to the earth, strove to distinguish the movements of their antagonists. At last, when the two parties had approached each other, they sprang suddenly up, and forming themselves in Indian file, commenced a combat in which they dealt furious blows with their blunt wooden tomahawks, exhibiting in every movement an extraordinary degree of activity and natural grace. Little interest was shown in these evolutions by the adult inhabitants of the village, whose extreme apathy and indifference contrasted curiously with the display of violent exertion on the part of the young Indians. Before the open doors of the huts sat the squaws and their daughters, stripping the maize from the ear, beating hemp, or picking tobacco; the children, who, according to Indian custom, are from their very birth kept in an upright posture, hanging against the outer walls on long concave boards or pieces of bark, to which their hands and feet were fastened by thongs of buffalo hide, their only garment a strip of calico round the hips.