Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/307

Rh handed to me her bowl and spoon. It was a kind of thin soup, in which beans were boiled, without salt and without the slightest flavour which I could perceive. She then offered me a cake which was just baked, of a golden brown, and which looked quite delicious. It was, I believe, made of wheaten flour, and without salt also, but very excellent nevertheless.

The interpreter was gone out. Governor Ramsay had also seated himself. The Indians filed on at their pipes; the flames flickered merrily; the kettle boiled; the women ate or looked at me, half reclining or sitting carelessly by the fire-light. And I—looked at them. With inward wonder I regarded these beings, women like myself, with the spirit and the feelings of women, yet so unlike myself in their purpose of life, in daily life, in the whole of their world!

I thought of hard, gray, domestic life, in the civilised world, a home without love, hedged in by conventional opinion, with social duties, the duty of seeking for the daughters of the family suitable husbands, otherwise they would never leave the family; and with every prospect of independence, liberty, activity, joy closed, more rigidly closed, by invisible barriers than these wigwams by their buffalo-hides; a northern domestic life—such a one as exists in a vast number of northern homes—and I thought that that Indian hut, and that Indian woman's life, was better, happier as earthly life.

Thus had I thought in the gas-lighted drawing-rooms of New York and Boston, in the heat and the labour of being polite or agreeable; of conversation and congratulation; of endeavouring to look well, to please and to be pleased, and—I thought that the wigwam of an Indian was a better and a happier world than that of the drawing-room. There they sate at their ease, without stays, or the anxiety to charm, without constraint or effort, those daughters of the forest! They knew not