This may seem hard to the poor Indian, but perhaps it was just as well.  It would have, indeed, been worse had the handsome maiden given her hand to the dusky Red, and afterwards, wooed by blue eyes, given her heart where her hand could never go.  And the Indian woman is no better and no worse than her kind, no matter what the colour be.  Happier, then, is the lot of the Indian with his homely affectionate wife, than with a bride with roses in her cheek, and sunlight in her eye, who cannot resist the pleading eye and the outstretched arms of one whose wooing is unlawful, and the result of which can be nought but wrong and misery.

The population grew and comforts increased till eighteen or twenty thousand souls could be reckoned in the colony.  The original whites had disappeared, and no face was to be seen but that of a Metis in any of the cosy dwellings in the settlement.  These people had not yet learnt that amongst the whites, whose blood knew no alloy, they were regarded as a debased sort, and unfit socially to mix with those who had kept their race free from taint.  The female fruitage of the mixture lost nothing by acquiring some of the Caucasian stock, but the men, in numerous cases, seemed to be inferior for the blending.  In appearance they were inane, in speech laconic; they were shy in manners, and reserved, to boorishness, while in intellectual alertness they were inferior to the boisterous savage, or the shrewd, dignified white.  But the woman perpetuated the shy, winning coyness of her red mother, and the arts, and somewhat of the refinements of her white father.  The eye was not so dusk; it gleamed more:  as if the ray from a star had been shot through it.  There was the same olive cheek; but it was not so tawny, for the dawn of the white blood had appeared in it.  She gained in symmetry too, being taller than her red mother, while she preserved the soft, willowy motion of the prairie-elk.

But the women were not good housekeepers; and many a traveller has gone into the house of a Metis and seen there a bride witchingly beautiful, with her hair unkempt and disordered about her shoulders, her boots unlaced, and her stocking down revealing her bare, exquisitely-turned ankle.

“A Cinderella!” he would exclaim, “but, by heaven, I swear, a thousand times more lovely!” If she had a child it would likely be found sprawling among the coals, and helping itself to handfuls of ashes.  The little creature would be sure to escape the suspicion of ever having been washed.  Ask the luminous-eyed mother for anything, for a knife to cut your tobacco, for a cup to get a drink of water, and the sweet sloven would be obliged to ransack two-thirds of the articles of the house to find what you sought.