their old men, in the morning before they fall to eating, preaches to the whole family, walking from the one end of the house to the other, and several times repeating the same sentence, till he has finished the round, for their houses are at least a hundred yards long.  Valour towards their enemies and love towards their wives, are the two heads of his discourse, never failing in the close, to put them in mind, that ’tis their wives who provide them their drink warm and well seasoned.  The fashion of their beds, ropes, swords, and of the wooden bracelets they tie about their wrists, when they go to fight, and of the great canes, bored hollow at one end, by the sound of which they keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in several places, and amongst others, at my house.  They shave all over, and much more neatly than we, without other razor than one of wood or stone.  They believe in the immortality of the soul, and that those who have merited well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven where the sun rises, and the accursed in the west.

They have I know not what kind of priests and prophets, who very rarely present themselves to the people, having their abode in the mountains.  At their arrival, there is a great feast, and solemn assembly of many villages:  each house, as I have described, makes a village, and they are about a French league distant from one another.  This prophet declaims to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty:  but all their ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war, and affection to their wives.  He also prophesies to them events to come, and the issues they are to expect from their enterprises, and prompts them to or diverts them from war:  but let him look to’t; for if he fail in his divination, and anything happen otherwise than he has foretold, he is cut into a thousand pieces, if he be caught, and condemned for a false prophet:  for that reason, if any of them has been mistaken, he is no more heard of.

Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture.  Amongst the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with firs and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death.—­[Herodotus, iv. 69.]—­Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can:  but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?