Sometimes the scheme was to examine what particular spot lay so, that the enemies must, in all necessity, pass through it, to hunt, or provide bark for making their canoes.  It was commonly in these passes, or defiles, that the bloodiest encounters or engagements happened, when whole nations have been known to destroy one another, with such an exterminating rage on both sides, that few have been left alive on either; and to say the truth, they were, generally speaking, mere cannibals.  It was rarely the case that they did not devour some limbs, at least, of the prisoners they made upon one another, after torturing them to death in the most cruel and shocking manner:  but they never failed of drinking their blood like water; it is now, some time, that our Micmakis especially are no longer in the taste of exercising such acts of barbarity.  I have, yet, lately myself seen amongst them some remains of that spirit of ferocity; some tendencies and approaches to those inhumanities; but they are nothing in comparison to what they used to be, and seem every day wearing out.  The religion to which we have brought them over, and our remonstrances have greatly contributed to soften that savage temper, and atrocious vindictiveness that heretofore reigned amongst them.  But remember, Sir, that as to this point I am now only speaking, upon my own knowlege, of the Micmakis and Mariquects, who, though different in language, have the same customs and manners, and are of the same way of thinking and acting.

But to arrive at any tolerable degree of conjecture, whence these people derive their origin own myself at a loss:  possibly some light might be got into it, by discovering whether there was any affinity or not between their language, and that of the Orientalists, as the Chinese or Tartars.  In the mean time, the abundance of words in this language surprized, and continues to surprize me every day the deeper I get into it.  Every thing is proper in it; nothing borrowed, as amongst us.  Here are no auxiliary verbs.  The prepositions are in great number.  This it is that gives great ease, fluency, and richness to the expression of whatever you require, when you are once master enough to join them to the verbs.  In all their absolute verbs they have a dual number.  What we call the imperfect, perfect, and preter-perfect tenses of the indicative mood, admits, as with us, of varied inflexions of the terminations to distinguish the person; but the difference of the three tenses is express, for the preter-perfect by the preposition Keetch; for the preter-pluperfect by Keetch Keeweeh:  the imperfect is again distinguished from them by having no preposition at all.

They have no feminine termination, either for the verbs or nouns.  This greatly facilitates to me my composition of songs and hymns for them, especially as their prose itself naturally runs into poetry, from the frequency of their tropes and metaphors; and into rhime, from their nouns being susceptible of the same termination, as that of the words in the verbs which express the different persons.  In speaking of persons absent, the words change their termination, as well in the nouns as in the verbs.