with pictures and hieroglyphics in red and brown and black pigments. Before the door two poles were set in the ground from each of which depended objects that aroused the boy’s curiosity. Nearing them, he saw that the right-hand pole held a dead owl suspended by a cord from one foot and that the other was decorated with a bunch of rushes tied about with a strip of blue cotton cloth through which was thrust a long white feather.
He turned to John and pointed. “What for?” he asked.
“Medicine,” was the reply.
What virtue lay in either a dead owl or a bunch of marsh rushes, David was at a loss to know, but Indian “medicine” as interpreted by the powwows was a thing beyond understanding.
There seemed to be about fifty wigwams within the fort, and later David estimated the inhabitants to be approximately two hundred in number, of which fully half were women and children below the fighting age. As Indian villages went, this one of the Wachoosetts’ was well-ordered and fairly clean. There was apparently no system in the disposition of the lodges, every one
