Behind these huts ran small gardens wherein were set melons and a large pepper of which we grew fond, and a nourishing root, and other plants.

But the soil was rich, rich, and they loosened and furrowed it with a sharpened stick.

There were no great forest beasts to set them sternly hunting.

What then could give them toil?
Not gathering the always falling fruit; not cutting from the trees and drying the calabashes, great and small, that they used for all manner of receptacle; not drawing out with a line of some stouter fiber than cotton and with a hook of bone or thorn the painted fish from their crystal water! To fell trees for canoes, to hollow the canoe, was labor, as was the building of their huts, but divided among so many it became light labor.

In those days we saw no Indian figure bowed with toil, and when it came it was not the Indian who imposed it.
But they swam, they rowed their canoes, they hunted in their not arduous fashion, they roved afar in their country at peace, and they danced.
That last was their fair, their games, their tourney, their pilgrimage, their processions to church, their attendance at mass, their expression of anything else that they felt altogether and at once! It was like children's play, renewed forever, and forever with zest.