They have a singular law for the collection of debts. If I trust an Indian goods, he belonging to another town or settlement, and he neglects to pay me, and I find another Indian belonging to the same town, having tortoise-shell or other produce in his canoe, I can take it away from him for the debt, and he must look to the man who was indebted to me, for remuneration. Marriage contracts are made by parents while the children are infants. Two families living in one neighborhood, one of them having a son and the other a daughter, enter into a contract that they shall be considered man and wife. When they are of a proper age to be joined together, all the inhabitants of the place assemble together, build them a house, help them to a hammock to sleep in, and a dinner-pot for cooking, and they commence as house keepers. After living together for some years as man and wife, the husband receives a present of a female child from _its_ parents, which he carries home, and calls it his _young wife_, the first wife taking the same care of it she would of her own children until it becomes of proper age, when the husband builds a new house for the first wife to live in, and takes the young wife for a house-keeper. I have often been invited into Indian houses and introduced to the family in this manner: "This is my old wife," pointing to an elderly woman, and "This is my young wife," pointing to a girl from six to ten years old. The old wife would smooth her hair and appear to feel a great deal of pride in being presented to me. On the day a woman is delivered of a child she goes to the sea-side, wades into the water knee depth, washes herself and infant, and the next day slings the child on her back, gets into a canoe and paddles two or three miles to visit her friends. I here take my leave of Musquitto laws and customs for the present. As the plan of cutting a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, by the way of the River St. Johns, which leads from the Atlantic into the Lakes Nicaragua and Leon, has so much engaged the attention of the public latterly, my thoughts have been carried back to a conversation I had with an old Musquitto Indian about thirty-five years since. He said, "The Indians frequently paddled their canoes up the St. John's River, through Nicaragua Lake into Lake Leon, where they found a small river, and proceeded to the head of it, which brought them so near the head of another river which led into the Pacific, that they hauled their canoes over by land from the head of one river to the other, and then passed through into the Pacific Ocean." CHAPTER X.