tems en tems lui rendre visite et lui faire leur harangue, comme s’il etoit en etat de les entendre.  Les uns lui demandent pourquoi il s’est laisse mourir avant eux? d’autres lui disent que s’il est mort ce n’est point leur faute; que c’est lui meme qui s’est tue par telle debauche on par tel effort; enfin s’il y a eu quelque defaut dans son gouvernement, on prend ce tems-la pour le lui reprocher.  Cependant ils finissent toujours leur harangue, en lui disant de n’etre pas fache contre eux, de bien manger, et qu’ils auront toujours bien soin de lui.

Another example of burial in houses may be found in vol. vi of the publications of the Hakluyt Society, 1849, p. 89, taken from Strachey’s Virginia.  It is given more as a curious narrative of an early writer on American ethnology than for any intrinsic value it may possess as a truthful relation of actual events.  It relates to the Indians of Virginia: 

Within the chauncell of the temple, by the Okens, are the cenotaphies or the monuments of their kings, whose bodyes, so soon as they be dead, they embowell, and, scraping the flesh from off the bones, they dry the same upon hurdells into ashes, which they put into little potts (like the anncyent urnes):  the annathomy of the bones they bind together or case up in leather, hanging braceletts, or chaines of copper, beads, pearle, or such like, as they used to wear about most of their joints and neck, and so repose the body upon a little scaffold (as upon a tomb), laying by the dead bodies’ feet all his riches in severall basketts, his apook, and pipe, and any one toy, which in his life he held most deare in his fancy; their inwards they stuff with pearle, copper, beads, and such trash, sowed in a skynne, which they overlapp againe very carefully in whit skynnes one or two, and the bodyes thus dressed lastly they rowle in matte, as for wynding sheets, and so lay them orderly one by one, as they dye in their turnes, upon an arche standing (as aforesaid) for the tomb, and thes are all the ceremonies we yet can learne that they give unto their dead.  We heare of no sweet oyles or oyntments that they use to dresse or chest their dead bodies with; albeit they want not of the pretious rozzin running out of the great cedar, wherewith in the old time they used to embalme dead bodies, washing them in the oyle and licoure thereof.  Only to the priests the care of these temples and holy interments are committed, and these temples are to them as solitary Asseteria colledged or ministers to exercise themselves in contemplation, for they are seldome out of them, and therefore often lye in them and maynteyne contynuall fier in the same, upon a hearth somewhat neere the east end.

For their ordinary burialls they digg a deepe hole in the earth with sharpe stakes, and the corps being lapped in skynns and matts with their jewells, they laye uppon sticks in the ground, and soe cover them with earth; the buryall