For fear of dirt, we spread our blankets over their hides, so as not to touch them anywhere.  The St. Francis Indian and Joe alone were there at first, and we lay on our backs talking with them till midnight.  They were very sociable, and, when they did not talk with us, kept up a steady chatting in their own language.  We heard a small bird just after dark, which, Joe said, sang at a certain hour in the night,—­at ten o’clock, he believed.  We also heard the hylodes and tree-toads, and the lumberers singing in their camp a quarter of a mile off.  I told them that I had seen pictured in old books pieces of human flesh drying on these crates; whereupon they repeated some tradition about the Mohawks eating human flesh, what parts they preferred, etc., and also of a battle with the Mohawks near Moosehead, in which many of the latter were killed; but I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way.  At first I was nearly roasted out, for I lay against one side of the camp, and felt the heat reflected not only from the birch-bark above, but from the side; and again I remembered the sufferings of the Jesuit missionaries, and what extremes of heat and cold the Indians were said to endure.  I struggled long between my desire to remain and talk with them, and my impulse to rush out and stretch myself on the cool grass; and when I was about to take the last step, Joe, hearing my murmurs, or else being uncomfortable himself, got up and partially dispersed the fire.  I suppose that that is Indian manners,—­to defend yourself.

While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper name introduced.  There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race, than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand.  We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular, but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us.  It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrow-heads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets.  It was a purely wild and primitive American sound, as much as the barking of a chickaree, and I could not understand a syllable of it; but Paugus, had he been there, would have understood it.  These Abenakis gossiped, laughed, and jested, in the language in which Eliot’s Indian Bible is written, the language which has been spoken in New England who shall say how long?  These were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born; they have not yet died away; and, with remarkably few exceptions, the language of their forefathers is still copious enough for them.  I felt that I stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of America, that night, as any of its discoverers ever did.