are to be had at the furriers’ shops in Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that style of costume appropriate for their wear.  The older women dress in the ordinary squaw costume, with short, narrow petticoats, and embroidered metasses, or leggings.  When going out, they fold a blue blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat, with a band of tin-foil around it,—­which makes them look like one of those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a bonton barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat.  The young girls are disposed to innovations upon the petticoats, and modifications of the metasses.  Once I saw one standing on a great gray crag at the foot of the fall.  She looked extremely picturesque at a little distance, giving a nice bit of local color to the scene with her scarlet legs; but on a nearer approach, much of the value of the color disappeared before the unromantic facts of a pale-face petticoat and patent-leather gaiter-boots.  I have noticed several of the younger people here with brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted.  In another generation or two, there will be little of it left among them.  But the correspondents of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood.  Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found in the neighborhood of Lorette.  Since that time, the construction of the Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood; and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender years:  but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused into them with the blood.

Few, if any, of the older people of Lorette speak English,—­Huron and French being the only languages at their command.  Since the building of the great reservoir, however, many of the rising generation are picking up the English tongue in its roundest Irish form.  Previously, matters were the reverse.  I once noticed a handsome, brown-faced boy there, who used to come about with a bow and arrows, soliciting coppers, which were placed one by one in a split stick, shot at, and pocketed by the archer, if hit,—­as they almost always were.  He spoke Indian and French, and I took him for an olive-branch of the tribe; but, on questioning him, he told me that his name was Bill Coogan, and that he first saw the light, I think, in Cork, Ireland.