Page:An account of a savage girl.djvu/83

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APPENDIX.
55

which she still held in her hand, and which had no ear-rings, to say, Oh! ours were neither like those in your hand, nor did they hang below the ear; but reached from the bottom of the ear down the back. As I could discover nothing about my figures, nor in the accounts sent me along with them, that could give me any idea of this difference, or which might have suggested it to her, I imagined that it had only occurred to her from the remembrance of something she had seen in her younger days, and of which she had but a confused idea. And, indeed, she immediately added herself, these ideas are so remote that they are little to be depended on.

It was not what she said upon this occasion that confirmed me in my opinion; but that instinct, or natural unaffected sentiment which attached her to these two figures alone, and rendered her indifferent to all the rest, as if nature had made her sensible that she was not so much concerned in the others as in these. Such, at least, was my reasoning on the distinction she made between them, and her saying so natural "We had nothing on our hands;" which the truth alone, tho' without her knowledge, made her utter.

Not content with these first trials, I caused produce a small canoe made of the bark of atree