to pass their summers near the settlers, were of detached and wandering families, who preferred this mode of living to the labour of tilling the ground, which entirely devolved upon the women among the Five Nations. By tilling the ground, I would not be understood to mean any settled mode of agriculture, requiring cattle, inclosures, or implements of husbandry. Grain made but a very subordinate part of their subsistence, which was chiefly derived from fishing and hunting. The little they had was maize; this, with kidney-beans and tobacco, the only plants they cultivated, was sown in some very pleasant fields along the Mohawk river, by the women, who had no implements of tillage but the hoe, and a kind of wooden spade. These fields laid round their _castles_—and while the women were thus employed, the men were catching and drying fish by the rivers or on the lakes. The younger girls, were much busied during summer and autumn, in gathering wild fruits, berries, and grapes, which they had a peculiar mode of drying, to preserve them for the winter. The great cranberry they gathered in abundance, which, without being dried, would last the whole winter, and was much used by the settlers. These dried fruits were no luxury; a fastidious taste would entirely reject them. Yet, besides furnishing another article of food, they had their use, as was evident. Without some antiseptic, they who lived the whole winter on animal food, without a single vegetable, or any thing of the nature of bread, unless now and then a little maize, which they had the art of boiling down to softness in lye of wood-ashes, must have been liable to that great scourge of northern nations, in their primitive state, the _scurvy_, had not this simple desert been a preservative against it. Rheumatisms, and sometimes agues affected them, but no symptom of any cutaneous disease was ever seen on an Indian. The stragglers, from the confines of the orchards, did not fail to join their tribes in winter, and were zealous, and often successful in spreading their new opinions. Indians supposed that every country had its own mode of honouring the Great Spirit, to whom all were equally acceptable. This had, on one hand, the bad effect of making them satisfied with their own vague and undefined notions; and on the other, the good one of making them very tolerant of those of others. If you do not insult their belief, (for mode of worship they have scarce any,) they will hear you talk of yours with the greatest patience and attention; their good breeding, in this respect, was really superlative. No Indian ever interrupted any the most idle talker; but when he concluded, he would deliberately, methodically, and not ungracefully answer or comment upon all he had said, in a manner which showed that not a word had escaped him.