“If a stranger wanders about your abode, welcome him to your home, be hospitable towards him, speak to him with kind words, and forget not always to mention the Great Spirit.” Upon the opening of their morning councils, a ceremony of condolence was performed, and an appropriate speech delivered in memory of those who had died or been slain in battle since their last meeting. The ceremonies on these occasions were very solemn, and their speeches full of pathos and tenderness. The funerals of chiefs, warriors, and distinguished women were attended by the heads of tribes, and all their people; and the respect in which they held their women is evinced by the honors they paid them when dead, being the same as those they bestowed upon chiefs and warriors. Their lamentations on being driven far away from the graves of their fathers have been the theme of all historians and travellers. Said an Indian chief, in his remonstrance against the treaty that was to remove the remnant of the Six Nations beyond the Mississippi, “We cannot go to the west, and leave the graves of our fathers to the care of strangers. The unhallowed clods would lie heavily upon our bosoms in that distant land if we should do this.” “Bury me by my grandmother,” said a little boy of seven years of age, a few moments before his death. “She used to be kind to me.” “Lay me in the churchyard by my mother,” said a little orphan girl, who had been under the care of the missionaries, when she learned she could not recover. “I shall be sorry if we must go far away to the west,” said an aged woman, who had seen eighty winters, “for I had hoped to be laid by my mother in yonder churchyard.” “In ancient times they had a beautiful custom of capturing a bird, and freeing it over the grave on the evening of burial, to bear away the spirit to its heavenly rest.” And their anxiety to obtain the bodies of their warriors slain in battle, and the impossibility of leaving the aged and helpless to die alone in the wilderness, was the result of a belief that the souls of those who received not the burial rites wandered about restless and unhappy. It may be easily imagined that a people who so loved their homes and revered their fathers’ graves, would become fierce with indignation and rage, on seeing themselves treated as without human feeling and the sacred relics of the dead ploughed up and scattered as indifferently as the stones, or the bones of the moose and the deer of the forest. It was this feeling which often prompted them to acts of hostility, which those who experienced them ascribed to wanton cruelty and barbarity. An instance occurred in New England, where the grave of a Sachem’s mother was robbed of the skins which had been placed there for her use, and the chieftain gathered his people together and exhorted them to revenge. In him it was the promptings of filial piety, and the dictates of his religion. He thus speaks: