They dart into the waterfall, and with five or six strokes of the tail they get up. It is not that there are falls in all these rivers, but in certain ones only. After having thus ascended, they disport themselves in these pools. Having remained there some time they ascend again still higher. To these places of rest the Indians went at night with their canoes and their torches. Where the pools are, there they carried their canoes through the woods, and launched them where the Salmon or the Trout were. These rarely are found together in the same pool. Being there, they lighted a torch. The Salmon or the Trout, seeing the fire which shines upon the water, come wheeling around the canoe. He who is standing up has in his hand a harpoon, which is the same as that used for Beaver, and likewise is fixed in the end of a long shaft. So soon as he saw a fish passing he speared at it, and rarely missed. But sometimes the spear did not take hold, for want of catching on some bone; thus they lost their fish. This did not prevent them from taking a hundred and fifty to two hundred in a night.

    They make use also of another device. At the narrowest place of the rivers, where there is the least water, they make a fence of wood clear across the river to hinder the passage of the fish. In the middle of it they leave an opening in which they place a bag-net like those used in France, so arranged that it is inevitable the fish should run into them. These bag-nets, which are larger than ours, they raise two or three times a day, and they always find fish therein. It is in spring that the fish ascend, and in autumn they descend and return to the sea. At that time they placed the opening of their bag-net in the other direction.

    All that I have said so far about the customs of the Indians, and of their diverse ways of doing things, ought to be understood only as the way in which they did them in old times. To this I shall add their burials, and the ancient ceremonies of their funerals. When some one of them died, there was great weeping in his wigwam. All his relatives and friends went there to weep, and this lasted three or four days without their eating. During this time there was delivered his funeral oration. Each one spoke one after another, for they never spoke two at a time, neither men or women. In this respect these barbarians give a fine lesson to those people who consider themselves more polished and wiser than they. A recital was made of all the genealogy of the dead man, of that

which he had done fine and good, of the stories that he (the orator) had heard told of his ancestors, of the great feasts and acknowledgments he had made in large number, of the animals he had killed in the hunt, and of all the other matters they considered it fitting to tell in praise of his predecessors. After this they came to the dead man; then the loud cries and weepings redoubled. This made the orator strike a pose, to which the men and women responded from time to time by a general groaning, all at one time and in the same tone. And often he who was speaking struck postures, and set himself to cry and weep with the others. Having said all that he wished to say, another began and said yet other things than the first. Then one after another, each after his own fashion, made his panegyric on the dead man. This lasted three or four days before the funeral oration was finished.

    After this it was necessary to make great tabagie, that is to say festival, and to rejoice in the great gratification the deceased will have in going to see all his ancestors, his relatives and good friends, and in the joy that each of them will have in seeing him, and the great feasts they will make for him. They believed that, being dead, they went into another land where everything abounded plentifully, and where they never had to work. The festival of joy being finished it was necessary to do some work for the dead.

    The women went to fetch fine pieces of bark from which they made a kind of bier on which they placed him well enwrapped. Then he was carried to a place where they had a staging built on purpose, and elevated eight or ten feet. On this they placed the bier, and there they left it about a year, until the time when the sun had entirely dried the body. During that time the wives of the deceased wept every time they met together in company, but not so long as the first time. Rarely the women re-married, or at least not until after the end of a year. Usually if they had children who could support them, they did not re-marry at all, and lived always with their children in widowhood.

    The end of the year having passed, and the body (being) dry, it was taken thence and carried to a new place, which is their cemetery. There it was placed in a new coffin or bier, also of Birch bark, and immediately after in a deep grave which they had made in the ground. Into this all his relatives and friends threw bows, arrows, snow-shoes, spears, robes of Moose, Otter, and Beaver, stockings, moccasins, and everything that was needful for him in hunting and in clothing himself. All the friends of the deceased

made him each his present, of the finest and best that they had. They competed as to who would make the most beautiful gift. At a time when they were not yet disabused of their errors, I have seen them give to the dead man, guns, axes, iron arrowheads, and kettles, for they held all these to be much more convenient for their use than would have been their kettles of wood, their axes of stone, and their knives of bone, for their use in the other world.

    There have been dead men in my time who have taken away more than two thousand pounds of peltries. This aroused pity in the French, and perhaps envy with it; but nevertheless one did not dare to go take the things, for this would have caused hatred and everlasting war, which it was not prudent to risk since it would have ruined entirely the trade we had with them. All the burials of the women, boys, girls, and children were made in the same fashion, but the weeping did not last so long. They never omitted to place with each one that which was fitting for his use, nor to bury it with him.

    It has been troublesome to disabuse them of that practice, although they have been told that all these things perished in the earth, and that if they would look there they would see that nothing had gone with the dead man. That was emphasised so much that finally they consented to open a grave, in which they were made to see that all was decayed. There was there among other things a kettle, all perforated with verdigris. An Indian having struck against it and found that it no longer sounded, began to make a great cry, and said that some one wished to deceive them. "We see indeed," said he, "the robes and all the rest, and if they are still there it is a sign that the dead man has not had need of them in the other world, where they have enough of them because of the length of time that they have been furnished them."

    "But with respect to the kettle," said he, "they have need of it, since it is among us a utensil of new introduction, and with which the other world cannot (yet) be furnished. Do you not indeed see," said he, rapping again upon the kettle, "that it has no longer any sound, and that it no longer says a word, because its spirit has abandoned it to go to be of use in the other world to the dead man to whom we have given it?"

    It was indeed difficult to keep from laughing, but much more difficult to disabuse him. For being shown another

which was worn out from use, and being made to hear that it spoke no word more than the other, "ha," said he, "that is because it is dead, and its soul has gone to the land where the souls of kettles are accustomed to go." And no other reason could be given at that time. Nevertheless, they have been disabused of that in the end, though with much difficulty, some by religion, (some by) the example of our own customs, and nearly all by the need for the things which come from us, the use of which has become to them an indispensable necessity. They have abandoned all their own utensils, whether because of the trouble they had as well to make as to use them, or because of the facility of obtaining from us, in exchange for skins which cost them almost nothing, the things which seemed to them invaluable, not so much for their novelty as for the convenience they derived therefrom. Above everything the kettle has always seemed to them, and seems still, the most valuable article they can obtain from us. This was rather pleasingly exemplified by an Indian who the late-Monsieur de Razilly sent from Acadia to Paris; for, passing by the Rue Aubry-bouche, where there were then many coppersmiths, he asked of his interpreter if they were not relatives of the King, and if this was not the trade of the grandest seigniors of the Kingdom. This little digression must not make me forget to say here, before finishing this chapter on funerals, that to express a thing such as it is when it can be no longer of use, they say that it is dead. For examp1e, when their canoe is broken, they say that it is dead, and thus with all other things out of service.

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