lowed them by the general consent of their comrades, in view of their wisdom, bravery, or ability. They lived, in fact, as one great family bound in close association by their habits of life and their family relationships, and they knew no such unnatural distinction as king or subject, lord or vassal.
Around their long bark tenements, stretched carefully cultivated fields of corn and pumpkins, the trailing bean, the full-bunched grapevine, the juicy melon, and the big-leafed tabah, or tobacco.
The field work was performed by the women, not from any necessity of a slavish condition or an enforced obedience, but because, where the men and boys must be warriors and hunters, the women and girls felt that it was their place and their duty to perform such menial labor as, to their unenlightened nature, seemed hardly suitable to those who were to become chiefs and heroes.
These sturdy forest-folk of old Virginia, who had reached that state of human advance, midway between savagery and civilization, that is known as barbarism, were but a small portion of that red-skinned, vigorous, and most interesting race familiar to us under their general but wrongly-used name of "Indians." They belonged to one of the largest divisions of this barbaric race, known as the Algonquin family—a division created solely by a similarity of language and of blood-relationships
