Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as savages do,—we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,—but the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron, but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of ancient Egypt. Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of Panama, or skirt the coast till they come to South America, and there they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru. Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave. They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin, the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool. Wild tribes of men continue streaming down from the north. Some of them conquer the Mexicans, and settle down among them and learn their arts. Some hover on the outskirts of the new civilization for a while, and learn how to spin and weave and raise corn, but then wander on to the east along the Gulf of Mexico, or north up the Mississippi. A group of these tribes, finding their way at last into the St. Lawrence Valley, settle down there and join forces in the great Iroquois alliance of the “Six Nations.” Their women grow corn, melons, beans and pumpkins, but the favorite occupation of the men is fighting, as the first white Canadians will discover to their cost in the seventeenth century. Between fights, they play a magnificent game of their own invention, which we call lacrosse. The goals are the two villages in which the teams live. [Illustration: _Lacrosse—Before the White Man Played It_]