Page:An account of a savage girl.djvu/60

32 strength, having at its end a round knot of very hard wood, the whole in the shape of a club, together with a knife resembling a gardener's pruning knife, but having two blades, each larger than that of a pruning knife, folding down upon the opposite sides of a wooden handle. This last instrument served principally to divide and open the animals they catched, or to defend themselves in a close engagement, These arms, she says, they carried in a kind of bag or pocket, fixed to a large piece of skin, which was wrapped round their bodies, and reached down to their knees. Upon my asking, Whether that dress did not incommode them in climbing trees, in the manner she had mentioned? She answered, that it did not; for that on such occasions, they held the back part of it in their teeth. Upon my inquiring with more than ordinary anxiety about this dress, and their other ornaments, that I might the better find them out in certain figures in my possession, representing Esquimaux, she told me, that her first cloaths, arms, necklace, and pendants, were taken from her at M. d'Epinoy's: That there were some strange characters engraved on her arms, which perhaps might have led to a more particular discovery of her nation; but that all these things were preserved by M. d'Epinoy as a curiosity, at whose house she often saw them and dressed herself in them sometimes. I was