ground was covered with flowers. The children tied them together and
tossed them as balls to and fro or wound them into chaplets for their
hair; the old squaws searched among them for certain roots and leaves
for dyes to stain the grass cloth they spun, called pemmenaw.

The boys played hunters, pretending their dogs were wild beasts, but the
bears and wolves did not always understand the parts assigned them and
frolicked and leaped up in delight upon their little masters instead of
turning upon them ferociously. The elder braves lay before their lodges,
many of them idling in the sunshine, others busied themselves making
arrows, fitting handles to stone knives or knotting crab nets. Two
slaves, brought home prisoners by a war party, were hollowing out a
dugout, which the Powhatans used instead of the birchbark canoes
preferred by other tribes. They had cut down an oak tree that, judging
from its rings, must have been an acorn when Powhatan was a papoose,
seventy years before. They had burned out a portion of the outer and
inner bark and were now hacking at the heart of the wood with sharp
obsidian axes.

The squaws were also all busy out of doors, though they chatted in
groups as eagerly as if their energy were being expended by their
tongues only. Many were at work scraping deerskin to soften it before
they cut it into robes for themselves or into moccasins for the men.
Here and there little puffs of smoke that seemed to come from beneath
the earth testified to the dinners that were being cooked under heated
stones.

Pocahontas was seated upon a small hill overlooking the village. As the
chief's daughter, it was only on special occasions and as an honored
guest, that she joined the knots of squaws or maidens chatting before