lo not expect you will remember all I have told you about the different towns, by reading my letters once or twice over. lf you wish to remember them, you must read them over a great many times, and look out all the towns on the map, and study very carefully to answer the questions. I do not suppose that all my letters will please you alike; but then you must consider, that those letters which are not the most pleasant to read, may be the most important to be remembered.

It is very necessary for every child of Massachusetts to know a good deal about the Commonwealth; and it is for this reason, that I have taken pains to write these letters. It is much easier, and commonly more pleasant, to read letters, than to write them; but as I hope you read carefully and study well what I write, I take great pleasure in writing. Nothing pleases a father more than to find his children ready and willing to learn; and it is good news when he is told that they behave well at school, and are good scholars-I hope I shall always hear this of you.

You see by what I have written in the preceding letters, that there are a great many fine towns, and beautiful villages, and well cultivated farms, and handsome houses, and large

factories, scattered over the State. There are wharves, ships and ware-houses, canals and roads; there are schools, colleges, and meeting-houses; and there are a great many other things which make Massachusetts a very pleasant land. But two hundred years ago there were no such things in the State. It was nearly all one great forest, and nothing lived in it, but bears and other wild beasts, and Indians, almost as wild as the beasts. You will like very well to hear about Massachusetts as it used to be, before the white people came to it, and about their first settling here. I will tell you something of these things in my next letter.

LETTER XLIV.

I HAVE already told you, that the white people came to Massachusetts about two hundred years ago. Before they came hither, the only people of the country were Indians. The Indians were a tall, well formed, active people. They had long, black, straight hair, black eyes, and very white, handsome teeth. Their color was brown, a little inclining to red. Their dress was made of the skins of wild beasts;

but in warm weather they went almost naked. They used to paint their bodies, and especially their faces, with black and red and white paint. They wore a sort of shoes on their feet, called moccasons, made of the skin of the deer, and ornamented very prettily with shells, feathers and beads. They lived in low smoky huts, called wigwams, which were made in a rude manner of small trees and bushes, and covered with bark, or with mats. The wigwam had but one room and no chimney. The fire was made in the middle, and the smoke went out through an open place in the top. The floor of the wigwam was the ground; but the Indians laid down mats and skins to sleep on, especially in cold weather. They slept with the feet towards the fire. The Indians had no tame animals about their dwellings. They had no convenient furniture, nor utensils for cooking or eating. They had no chairs nor stools nor tables; they had no pots nor kettles, except such as were made of stone. These kettles would not bear the fire, and they boiled their meat by filling the kettles full of water, and putting red hot stones into them. They roasted their fish or meat on the bare coals, and held it in their fingers to eat it. They had no salt to eat with their food, and

very few vegetables. They raised a few squashes and beans, a little corn and a few other things; but these made up but a small part of their food. They parched their corn and pounded it into meal for bread, which they baked on a flat stone by the fire.

The Indians had no iron; all their tools were made either of stone, of sea shells, of bone, or of hard wood. They cut down trees as well as they could with their poor stone axes. They killed birds and beasts with the bow and arrow; or caught them in a sort of trap. Their arrow heads were made of stone; their bow strings of the sinews of the deer. They caught fish with a hook made of bone, or else in a sort of net. They had no ploughs nor hoes. They dug the earth with a stick or clam shell. The women did the work on the ground, and the men did the hunting and fishing. The Indians were a very ignorant people. They had no books. They could not read nor write a single word. They knew nothing about letters. They knew nothing about the truc God and Saviour, and all their thoughts of the future state, that is, the state after death, were very erroneous.

The Indians lived together in tribes, and commonly built their towns by the sides of

rivers, ponds, or lakes.

An Indian town was

only a few wigwams, built near each other. There were three large tribes of Indians in Massachusetts, and a great many small ones; but the whole State, I should think, did not contain near as many Indians, as there are people now in the city of Boston.

The Indians made very pretty little boats, called canoes, of birch bark, to go upon the water. They also made beautiful little baskets of the twigs of trees, to put their corn and other things in, and mats to sleep on. The Indians were fond of smoking tobacco, and made convenient pipes of stone. They made bows of ash or walnut, which they used in hunting. They made a kind of beads of a shell which they found on the sea-shore. These beads they strung together, and out of the strings, they made belts. These belts were often very pretty. The beads were called wampum. There were three kinds of wampum, black, red, and white. The Indians valued it highly, and used it as money.

The country was covered all over with thick dark woods; except in the places where the Indians had their little towns. In the woods were a great number of wild beasts and birds which the Indians hunted. It was a