A string of black wampum sent round the settlement is still, among the Indians of the Six Nations, the notice of the death of a chief, as a belt of black wampum was a declaration of war. It seems not improbable that the people of Stadaconé and Hochelaga had submitted to the wise social and religious reforms by which the ancient rites of their dead were superseded by the symbolism of the mourning wampum, and hence the absence of ossuaries throughout the island of Montreal and the whole region to the east. But when the fugitive Wyandots fled into the wilderness, and reared new homes around Lake Simcoe and in the western peninsula, they may have revived traditional usages of their fathers, and resumed rites which had been reluctantly abandoned. Among the civilised Indians of the Six Nations some memorials of their ancestral rites of the dead still survive. A visitor to the reserve at the time of the death of a late highly esteemed chief told me that on the event being known it was immediately responded to by all within hearing by the prolonged utterance, in a mournful tone, of the cry _Kwé_, and this, passing from station to station, spread the news of their loss throughout the reserve. Nearly the same sound, uttered in a quicker note, _Quaig!_ is the salutation among the Hurons of Lorette. The later history of the Hurons and Iroquois is not without its special interest. One little band, the Hurons of Lorette, the representatives of the refugees from the massacre of 1648, has lingered till our own day in too close proximity to the French _habitants_ of Quebec to preserve in purity the blood of the old race. But great as are the alterations which time and intermixture with the white race have effected, they still retain many intellectual as well as physical traits of their original stock after an interval of two hundred and thirty-six years, during which intimate intercourse, and latterly frequent intermarriage with those of European blood, have wrought inevitable change on the race.[139] Other more vigorous representatives of the old Huron stock occupy a small reservation in the Township of Anderdon, in Western Ontario, from whom the vocabulary was derived which furnished a test of the language of the Hochelagans in the sixteenth century. But the Hurons of Lorette have also preserved their native tongue; and an ample vocabulary[140] of the older form of their language survives. A third modification of the ancient tongue no doubt exists; for the larger remnant of the survivors of the Hurons, after repeated wanderings, is now settled, far from the native home of the race, on reserves conceded to them by the American Government in Kansas.