1635, 221 (Cramoisy). ]

The Fathers' slumbers were brief and broken. Winter was the season of
Huron festivity; and, as they lay stretched on their hard couch,
suffocating with smoke and tormented by an inevitable multitude of fleas,
the thumping of the drum resounded all night long from a neighboring
house, mingled with the sound of the tortoise-shell rattle, the stamping
of moccasined feet, and the cadence of voices keeping time with the
dancers. Again, some ambitious villager would give a feast, and invite
all the warriors of the neighboring towns; or some grand wager of
gambling, with its attendant drumming, singing, and outcries, filled the
night with discord.

But these were light annoyances, compared with the insane rites to cure
the sick, prescribed by the "medicine-men," or ordained by the eccentric
inspiration of dreams. In one case, a young sorcerer, by alternate
gorging and fasting,--both in the interest of his profession,--joined
with excessive exertion in singing to the spirits, contracted a disorder
of the brain, which caused him, in mid-winter, to run naked about the
village, howling like a wolf. The whole population bestirred itself to
effect a cure. The patient had, or pretended to have, a dream, in which
the conditions of his recovery were revealed to him. These were equally
ridiculous and difficult; but the elders met in council, and all the
villagers lent their aid, till every requisition was fulfilled, and the
incongruous mass of gifts which the madman's dream had demanded were all
bestowed upon him. This cure failing, a "medicine-feast" was tried; then
several dances in succession. As the patient remained as crazy as before,
preparations were begun for a grand dance, more potent than all the rest.
Brebeuf says, that, except the masquerades of the Carnival among
Christians, he never saw a folly equal to it. "Some," he adds, "had