The sun had now risen in cloudless glory--all was life and movement. I strayed and loitered for full three hours along the shore, I hardly knew whither, sitting down occasionally under the shadow of a cliff or cedar fence to rest, and watching the operations of the Indian families. It were endless to tell you of each individual group or picture as successively presented before me. But there were some general features of the scene which struck me at once. There were more than one hundred lodges, and round each of these lurked several ill-looking, half-starved, yelping dogs. The women were busied about their children, or making fires and cooking, or pounding Indian corn, in a primitive sort of mortar, formed of part of a tree hollowed out, with a heavy rude pestle which they moved up and down, as if churning. The dress of the men was very various--the cotton shirt, blue or scarlet leggings, and deer-skin mocassins and blanket coat, were most general; but many had no shirt nor vest, merely the cloth leggings, and a blanket thrown round them as drapery; the faces of several being most grotesquely painted. The dress of the women was more uniform,--a cotton shirt, and cloth leggings and mocassins, and a dark blue blanket. Necklaces, silver armlets, silver earrings, and circular plates of silver fastened on the breast, were the usual ornaments of both sexes. There may be a general equality of rank among the Indians; but there is evidently all that inequality of condition which difference of character and intellect might naturally produce; there were rich wigwams and poor wigwams; whole families ragged, meagre, and squalid, and others gay with dress and ornaments, fat and well-favoured: on the whole, these were beings quite distinct from any Indians I had yet seen, and realised all my ideas of the wild and lordly savage. I remember I came upon a family group, consisting of a fine tall young man and two squaws; one had a child swaddled in one of their curious bark cradles, which she composedly hung up against the side of the wigwam. They were then busied launching a canoe, and in a moment it was dancing upon the rippling waves: one woman guided the canoe, the other paddled; the young man stood in the prow in a striking and graceful attitude, poising his fish-spear in his hand. When they were about a hundred yards from the shore, suddenly I saw the fish-spear darted into the water, and disappear beneath it; as it sprang up again to the surface, it was rapidly seized, and a large fish was sticking to the prongs; the same process was repeated with unerring success, and then the canoe was paddled back to the land. The young man flung his spear into the bottom of the canoe, and, drawing his blanket round him, leapt on shore, and lounged away without troubling himself farther; the women drew up the canoe, kindled a fire, and suspended the fish over it, to be cooked _à la mode Indienne_.