The Indian knew no means of providing for the future, except the husbanding, in great baskets, of his corn, drying persimmons on hurdles and oysters on strings. He never herded wild cattle or tamed the wild turkeys. Each season Nature brought of her abundance to these her untutored children, fish, game, fruits, melons, and in the hardest times acorns and roots. When famine seemed imminent, they would migrate in great companies to hunt the deer, the women going before, bearing on their backs mats, household utensils, skins for bedding, and even poles for the temporary huts. They would stake out the camp and make all ready for the men. Then in leisure hours the young maidens, round, pretty creatures with small hands and feet, would freshly paint themselves a brilliant red, and seated at the door of the sylvan arbour watch the young braves,--heavy, thick-lipped, thick-nosed fellows, but active and straight-limbed; magnificent and terrible in skins decorated with the dried hands of their enemies, claws of beasts and birds; and with green and yellow snakes thrust alive through their ears,--while they practised shooting arrows at a mark. The straightest, surest marksman would find no trouble in winning the prettiest maiden. Pretty maidens, all the world over, have realized that they needed game, furs, pearls, and copper. The arrow won them in 1607 as surely as a _coup_ in Wall Street or in trade wins them in 1907. The comment of our historian seems to us as reasonable as it is quaint: "Every man in tyme of hunting will strive to doe his best, for thereby they wyn the loves of their women, who will be sooner contented to live with such a man by the readyness and fortune of whose bow they perceave they are likely to be fedd well, especially of fish and flesh; for indeed they be all of them huge eaters, and these active hunters by their continuall ranging and travell do know all places most frequented and best stored with deare or other beasts, fish, fowle, roots, fruits, and berries." The Indians, like all barbarous people, danced to some kind of metrical sound, either from a cane on which they piped as on a "recorder," or drums stretched over hollow bowls or gourds, or rattles contrived from shells. These accompanied the voice in "frightful howlings." They had also "amorous ditties," and scornful songs inspired by their hatred of the English. The historian Strachey gives a copy, in the Indian language, of one of these, of four stanzas,--not rhyming but metrical, in which they not only exult over the men they had killed in spite of our guns, but they tell how Newport had never deceived them for all his presents of copper and the crown for Powhatan; and how they had continued to kill and take prisoners, "Symon" and others, for all their bright swords and tomahawks, ending each verse with the chorus or cry, "Whe, whe! yah, ha, ha! Tewittawa Tewittawa!" expressive of scornful, mocking exultation.