Bracelets are beaten-out pieces of copper or brass wire and silver coins, highly polished, and worn chiefly by the women, who often carry several upon each arm. When worn upon the ankles they are forged in round sections, while for the wrist they are made quite flat. Tattooing once was universal, but is now going out of style; and, until quite lately, the females all wore labrets in the lower lips—this disgusting distortion is also being abated. Only among the very old women can this monstrosity now be found in its original form. Most of the middle-aged squaws still have a small aperture in the lower lip, through which a little silver, beaten tube, of the size of a quill, is thrust, and projects from the face, just above the chin, about a quarter of an inch. The younger women have not even this remnant of a most atrocious old custom. The ears are often pierced, and tiny shell ornaments, backed with thin sheet-silver or copper, are inserted; and also the septum of the nose is perforated, of both sexes very generally, for the insertion of a silver ring, or a pendant of haliotis shell. Each village has its _lex non scripta_, and is a law unto itself everywhere within the confines of the Alexander archipelago; or, in different words, it conducts its affairs wholly without reference to any other village or savages—it is the largest unit in the Indian system of government. Living as they do in these settlements, where they know each other just as well and as familiarly as we know the individual members of our own private home circles, no matter whether the village contain a thousand souls or but half a dozen—there are no strangers in it. Every little daily incident of each other’s simple life, every move that they make, what they capture in the forest or hook out from the sea, is regularly recounted in the rancheries over night. All engaged in precisely the same calling of fishing and hunting, naturally there is no room among them for the eager rivalries and passionate enterprises which our living stimulates and sustains. Therefore the routine of government is almost nothing in its detail—no laws appear to be necessary, and they are not acknowledged; but any action tending to the injury of another, in person or property, lays the offender open to reprisals by the sufferer—usually atoned for—and the village feud, thus aroused, is soon satisfied by a payment in blankets, or other valuable property, to a full settlement. Injuries, thefts and murder, however, which, inflicted by the people of one village upon another, either close at hand or remote, have not always been adjusted in this amicable manner; hence, from time immemorial, the disputants have been at war with each other in this region, and the result of these wars has been to divide them into the existing clans as we find them now. Their internecine warfare was carried on in true savage style. If the cause was one which concerned the whole village, then the chief of that