Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/258

248 of Indian land, now wholly hers. It was formerly exchanged by a white man for some better land, then occupied by Indians at Westport, which he wanted. So said a Quaker minister, her neighbor. The squaw was not at home when we first called. It was a little hut, not so big as mine. No garden, only some lettuce amid the thin grass in front, and a great pile of clam and quahog shells one side. Ere long she came from the seaside and we called again. We knocked and walked in, and she asked us to sit down. She had half an acre of the real tawny Indian face, broad with high cheek bones, black eyes, and straight hair, originally black, but now a little gray, parted in the middle. Her hands were several shades darker than her face. She had a peculiarly vacant expression, perhaps characteristic of the Indian, and answered our questions listlessly, without being interested or implicated, mostly in monosyllables, as if hardly present there. To judge from her physiognomy, she might have been King Philip's own daughter. Yet she could not speak a word of Indian, and knew nothing of her race, said she had lived with the whites, gone out to service to them when seven years old. Had lived part of her life at Squaw Betty's Neck, Assawanipsett Pond. She said she was sixty years old, but was probably nearer seventy. She sat with her