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We saw here some of the Northern Indians of the Haidah tribe, from Queen Charlotte's Islands. They came in large canoes, some of which would hold a hundred men, and yet each was hollowed out of a single log of cedar. They came down to bring a cargo of dogfish-oil to the light-house at Cape Flattery. They camped for two weeks on the beach, and we went often to see them.
We shall endeavor to procure from Victoria a dictionary of the Haidah, Chinook, and other Indian languages, by the aid of which we shall be able to receive such visitors in a more satisfactory manner. At present, we can only smile very much at them. Fortunately, on this occasion, our carpenter was present, who told us that the man was called "Hunter," which served as an introduction.
The Haidah Indians, for example, paint designs with great freedom and skill, and those applied to woven surfaces are identical with those executed upon skins, wood, and stone, but this art is doubtless much modified by the means and methods of Europeans. Our studies should be confined wholly to pure indigenous art.
The carts are of iron, but resemble in form certain hand-wagons which one sees every day being pulled and pushed through the streets by bare-limbed Japanese labourers, chanting always the same melancholy alternating chorus, Haidak! hei! haidah hei!
So far as I was able to observe the matter, the Berber muleteers of El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haidah looked with great scorn upon these Bedouins, and their contempt was reciprocated. In the eyes of the Berbers these men were outcasts and "eaters of sand," and in the eyes of the Bedouins the muleteers were puling, town-bred slaves, who dared not say their right hands were their own.
"Kolo and Haidah are the girls. They are sweet, and I love them. I had breakfast with them this morning long before you were awake." "The deuce you say! And that is why you were not at table? And the morning before " "You noticed my absence?" she asked demurely. "It was difficult for me not to see an empty chair.
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