Behind
these huts ran small gardens wherein were set melons
and a large pepper of which we grew fond, and a nourishing
root, and other plants. But the soil was rich, rich, and
they loosened and furrowed it with a sharpened stick. There
were no great forest beasts to set them sternly hunting.
What then could give them toil? Not gathering the always
falling fruit; not cutting from the trees and drying the
calabashes, great and small, that they used for all manner
of receptacle; not drawing out with a line of some stouter
fiber than cotton and with a hook of bone or thorn the
painted fish from their crystal water! To fell trees for
canoes, to hollow the canoe, was labor, as was the building
of their huts, but divided among so many it became light
labor. In those days we saw no Indian figure bowed with
toil, and when it came it was not the Indian who imposed
it.
But they swam, they rowed their canoes, they hunted in
their not arduous fashion, they roved afar in their country
at peace, and they danced. That last was their fair, their
games, their tourney, their pilgrimage, their processions to
church, their attendance at mass, their expression of anything
else that they felt altogether and at once! It was like
children's play, renewed forever, and forever with zest. But
they did not treat it as play.
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