Along the frontiers, where the Indians have been ridiculed for the custom, as they are for everything that is not _civil_ about them, they have in many instances departed from it; but even there, they will generally be seen lugging their child about in this way, when they have abandoned almost every other native custom, and are too poor to cover it with more than rags and strings, which fasten it to its cradle. The infant is carried in this manner until it is five, six or seven months old, after which it is carried on the back, in the manner represented in two of the figures of the same plate, and held within the folds of the robe of blanket. The modes of carrying the infant when riding, are also here shewn, and the manner in which the women ride, which, amongst all the tribes, is _astride_, in the same manner as that practiced by the men. Letter _b_ in the same plate is a _mourning cradle_, and opens to the view of the reader another very curious and interesting custom. If the infant dies during the time that is allotted to it to be carried in this cradle, it is buried, and the disconsolate mother fills the cradle with black quills and feathers, in the parts which the child’s body had occupied, and in this way carries it around with her wherever she goes for a year or more, with as much care as if her infant were alive and in it; and she often lays or stands it leaning against the side of the wigwam, where she is all day engaged in her needle-work, and chatting and talking to it as familiarly and affectionately as if it were her loved infant, instead of its shell, that she was talking to. So lasting and so strong is the affection of these women for the lost child, that it matters not how heavy or cruel their load, or how rugged the route they have to pass over, they will faithfully carry this, and carefully from day to day, and even more strictly perform their duties to it, than if the child were alive and in it. In the little toy that I have mentioned, and which is suspended before the child’s face, is carefully and superstitiously preserved the _umbilicus_, which is always secured at the time of its birth, and being rolled up into a little wad of the size of a pea, and dried, it is enclosed in the centre of this little bag, and placed before the child’s face, as its protector and its security for “_good luck_” and long life. Letter _c_, same plate, exhibits a number of forms and different tastes of several of these little toys, which I have purchased from the women, which they were very willing to sell for a trifling present; but in every instance, they cut them open, and removed from within a bunch of cotton or moss, the little sacred _medicine_, which, to part with, would be to “endanger the health of the child”—a thing that no consideration would have induced them in any instance to have done.