his 50 years unmarred by abdominal deformation or fallen arches and with a vigor which the average white man of 30 well might envy. It is his custom to roll out of bed shortly after dawn, pull over his shirt of many colors a pair of cheap cotton trousers tied with cord about the ankles, stow shotgun and shells in the bow of his cypress canoe, and start off on his daily hunt without eating a mouthful of breakfast. In the wet season one can push a dugout most anywhere through the Everglades. Where the water is shallow, he wades; when it deepens to 8 or 10 inches he steps in and poles. Shoving a canoe through water all day is something that any man in good condition can do; shoving all day through the mixture of grass and water which is the Everglades is something which only a Seminole can do.

He poles across these infinite marshes until bent grass, perhaps, arrests his attention, telling him not only which way the deer went but how long ago. Only a clever hunter like the Seminole can stalk deer in glades which afford no cover. If no fresh signs of deer are seen, or if the camp be stocked with meat, Whitney shoves on to an alligator hole in the edge of a hammock. Water 4 or 5 feet deep, perhaps. He pokes about with a pole to locate his prey. Failing to find him that way, the hunter holds his nose and imitates the grunt of the beast. To amuse me, Whitney one day called an 8-foot alligator to the surface four times in the course of half an hour. It seemed a bit indecent thus to play upon reptilian passion. In the operation of skinning, his movements were swift, sure, clever.

Generally this Indian returned to camp around noon, for the midday August heat was intense. One day he brought home a buck, another a turtle and some duck eggs, sometimes nothing at all. Curlew and turkeys were abundant, but the food problem was so easily settled that he preferred to put in his time hunting for things with a cash value alligator hides, buckskin, coon skins. I have known him to stay out all day without eating.

At whatever hour he returned to camp, Whitney would pull off his wet trousers, eat, then stretch out for a siesta. It is the mark of a man that whatever he does, he does with a will. The Seminole, after four or five hours of vigorous exercise, can loaf for half a day with zest. But usually the necessity to fetch firewood, or some puttering job about camp or garden, kept this worker fairly busy.

SECTION 5. THE SQUAW

Sally Cypress, the squaw, is a woman of 38, a tall woman 5 feet 9 or 10. Although she has given birth nine times, she still carries herself erect; generously fleshed, she yet moves with vigor and alertness.

Her costume consists of a skirt, a chemise with sleeves, and a cape. Neither shoes nor stockings nor hats are worn. The skirt sweeps the ground. The chemise slips over the head and hangs down just enough to cover the breasts. The cape covers the elbows and meets the waistband of the skirt. A costume dictated by a modesty veritably mid-Victorian. Its structure marks the Seminole as a human being altogether original and unique. In making a gown, or a shirt for her husband, the Seminole woman starts with cotton cloths of many colors, but for the most part solid colors, not patterns. These she tears into strips from a quarter of an inch to 3 inches wide. With

her Singer sewing machine she concocts a marvelous confection. The strips run horizontally; but within the strip may be diamonds, vertical elements, and rarely decorations in curves. I have before me a skirt in nowise unusual where 44 bands of color meet the eye between hem and waistband.

It sounds horrible; actually it is magnificent, a thing of barbaric splendor. His costume is the reaction of a strong man against monotony. Driven by force of superior arms and numbers to the dreariest of all North American environments, the Seminole has made himself as gay as the parrots in the Amazon jungle.

"Life shall be colorful, even in the Big Cypress Swamp," his soul has proclaimed, and deft fingers have executed the mandate.

There is yet another element of the squaw's costume as remarkable as her gown. I refer not to the fact of beads about her neck but to the quantity of beads. String after string after string, until a solid pyramid extends from shoulder blades to chin. Twenty-five pounds and a few ounces one set was found to weigh. She takes most of them off at night, but she would no more appear in camp without them in the morning than she would without her skirt.

Now a skirt that sweeps the ground and 25 pounds of decoration about the neck would seem but poor preparation for a hard day's work. Yet I have seen this Sally Cypress leave camp at 9 in the morning with an umbrella in one hand and 2 feet of quarter-inch rope in the other and be gone until 9 at night, long after dark. On inquiring where she had been, I learned that she had been catching her young pigs, marking and castrating. For the Seminole woman is absolute mistress of her own property, and is frequently wealthier in the matter of hogs than her husband.

Built of such stuff, it is not surprising to find that childbirth with this woman is no such ordeal of prolonged agony as with white women. As the day approaches, she builds a palmetto shelter whereever she can find a dry bit of land a hundred yards or two from camp, drives a stake in the ground to grasp with her hands, and if none of her women folk are about to assist, she goes off alone and has her child.

SECTION 6. CHILDREN OF THE CYPRESS

Of the 9 children born to Whitney and Sally Cypress, 5 live and 4 have paid the penalty of being born to primitive parents crouched on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp. The living are Suc-la-ti-kee, a daughter of 16; See-ho-kee, her sister, two years younger; Che-na-see, a girl of 9; a son and heir aged 11; and a lad of 7.

The competence of the two older girls is admirable. Whitney comes in from the hunt and throws down a great turtle. Suc-la-ti-kee

turns off the phonograph, finds a knife, dresses the turtle, and has it roasting beside a slow fire within 10 minutes; no hurrying, no false moves. I wanted a cape to go with a certain skirt that I was buying. She sat down to a hand sewing machine and with deft fingers in two hours time cut, sewed, and finished a garment which in workmanship, in color combinations, in line was a delight. All the cooking is done by these girls with the same ease. Like all women by the stream in warm climates, they make of washing clothes a lark. And then they sit for hours on end and play the phonograph. They differ from white girls of the same age in that they prefer cigars to

cigarettes, and in their ability to hitch up a yoke of oxen and walk, unaccompanied by man, the 45 miles to Immokalee and back, camping by the way.

All these children are as we would like our own to be in their good nature, their playfulness, in the respect they show their elders, in their essential modesty and good breeding. As we sat about the campfire in the evening and I listened to their low voices or merry laugh, I saw the appropriateness of the remark of Perley Poore Sheehan, an Irish novelist who went into the Big Cypress with Brandon 12 years ago:

And the Seminoles-say, they reminded me more than anything else of the peasants on the west coast of Ireland, gentle mystics, with a great sense of humor, believers in "the little people," in ghosts and signs, hearers of voices, seers of visions.

SECTION 7. BILLY FEWELL

By far the most interesting member of Guava Camp remains to be mentioned, Billy Fewell, the father of Sally Cypress. Whether he is 83, as the census states, or 100 as some of his many friends aver, makes little difference. He is old. Old enough to remember that May 4 in 1858 when the Grey Cloud, bearing Billy Bowlegs and 163 of his kinsmen, sailed out of Fort Myers bearing the last of the Seminole emigrants into exile west of the Mississippi.

This grand old man was a famous character 50 years ago when Clay MacCauley was here, for he had earned the name of "Key West Billy" by paddling a dugout canoe from Miami to Key West, remaining a fortnight there among the whites.

I shall never forget the dignity, the courtesy with which he received me, a stranger, as a guest in his camp. I had no claim upon his hospitality, yet when Whitney hung up a carcass of venison the second day of my visit, Billy came over to my tent and bade me help myself. He speaks English fairly well and we had long talks together.

Of a morning Billy was usually the first one up and about. He would cut a handful of brush, tie it together, and with this improvised broom sweep the whole area between the buildings and about the fire. He always ate at my table, and he seemed partial to my comfortable camp chairs, for the Seminole camp lacks this convenience. I used to pass cigars after meals; old Billy's asthma was bothering him too much for him to smoke, but he always took one and hid it away in the thatch above his bed.

That cough. One night it rained in torrents. Old Billy stretched a muslin sheet about his bed, but I knew the rain was driving through upon him. And all night long above the tattoo upon my tight silk tent I heard that cough.

He was in this camp by right of tribal custom. He was the father of Sally Cypress. Yet I had the feeling that the burden of years, a mouth to be fed after a man's hunting days are done, takes from old age some of the kindness which from kin should be its due.

SECTION 8. INVENTORY OF PROPERTY

How does this family of eight live? What do they eat? Where do they sleep? In what does their wealth consist? To understand the life of Guava Camp is to understand nine-tenths of the Seminole camps in Florida.

An inventory of the property visible to the eye in this camp revealed the following:

Livestock: 12 chickens, 2 dogs and a pup, 5 hogs about camp (probably 50 on the range), 2 oxen.

Transportation: 1 four-wheeled wagon with top, 1 ox yoke, 1 dugout cypress

canoe.

Firearms: 1 double-barreled 12-gage shotgun, 1 combination 0.38 rifle and 12-gage shotgun.

Tools: 1 ax, 1 hoe, 1 machete, 2 sheath knives for skinning.

Kitchen equipment: 1 mortar and pestle, 2 large iron kettles for sofskee and stew, 2 wooden sofskee spoons, 2 basket sieves, 1 Dutch oven, 2 water pails, 1 dish for bread, 2 fry pans, 2 coffee pots, 1 kettle, 6 cups, 1 brass-bound wooden bucket, 3 five-gallon tin cans with covers.

Household equipment: 6 mosquito nets, 6 blankets, 2 movable benches, 1 footpedal sewing machine, 1 hand sewing machine, 1 lantern, 1 umbrella, 1 phonograph (15 records), 1 long muslin sheet (used as windbreak), 1 pair scissors. Toilet articles: 1 mirror, 2 combs, 1 bucket for washing.

Children's toys: 1 homemade toy wagon, 12 homemade dolls (2 inches long). Clothing: 4 bundles in addition to clothes worn, 10 yards of calico in odd lengths.

Ornaments: 50 pounds of neck beads, 2 bead chains with silver coins, 1 bead chain with gold coin, 12 silver cape ornaments, 4 silver crescents (Billy Fewell), 6 beaded hair nets.

SECTION 9. CLOTHING

I could make no detailed inventory of the quantity of clothing at Guava camp, but it was adequate. On wash day there would be as many as half a dozen complete sets of garments on the rail, dresses as brilliant as the spread of a peacock's tail, the only decorative washing I have over seen drying in the sun. When I expressed a desire to buy two or three costumes as souvenirs, the women brought out bundle after bundle of new garments to choose from.

A white hunter would consider some kind of waterproof outer garment desirable, but inasmuch as the rainy season is also the warm season in south Florida, this lack is not serious.

SECTION 10. FOOD

Nor was there any shortage of food in this camp. In fact, it was a feast from morning to night, for the Seminole is superior to regular meal hours. On arising in the morning, one of the girls would kindle the fire, heat up a kettle of meat stew, a kettle of hominy grits, a pot of coffee, and bake a pan of biscuits. Dried venison was the staple meat that went into the pot; occasionally curlew, whooping crane, duck, chicken, pork, or wild turkey finds its way there. The grits are boiled as a very thin gruel, which the Indians call sofskee.

These dishes, when hot, were placed on the dining platform. At intervals all day long one or another (but rarely all at once) would sit beside the pots, reach into the kettle for a morsel of meat, drink from the great wooden sofskee ladle, dip a biscuit in the gravy, and wash it down with coffee. There was a noticeable absence of salt in their dishes, and their stock of sugar was nearly exhausted.

The only fruit available at the time I visited the family Cypress was the guavas after which the camp is named. In season, however, there is available to all these Indians sour oranges and limes, some bananas, quantities of blueberries, and wild plums.

Their table in August was noticeably void of fresh vegetables. That was from choice and not necessity, because there is always

available the tender bud of the cabbage palmetto, delicious either raw or cooked. In the dry season, however, their little garden yields corn, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and a few shoots of sugar

cane.

SECTION 11. SLEEPING

When night descended and the sand flies and mosquitoes became troublesome, mosquito bars made of a fine-meshed cotton cloth were stretched over each bed. The father and mother and two older daughters occupied one sleeping platform, rather a strange arrangement, inasmuch as nothing but the thickness of two mosquito bars separated the intimacies of married life from the daughters in the other bed. The grandfather and younger children under separate mosquito bars occupied another platform. A blanket or a buckskin between the sleeper and his hard bed was all they asked. In the cold weather of winter a blanket to roll up in suffices, although a white man would experience bitter discomfort with so little in freezing weather I fancy an Indian could stand another blanket at times. If the night were rainy, a long muslin sheet was stretched around the house between the eaves and the sleeping platform to break the wind, although it did not always keep out the rain. The dogs and the chickens and the pigs found shelter under the platforms or near the fire.

Sleep was generally preceded by hours of low-voiced conversation interspersed with music from a phonograph. And so long as I was there to supply them, all-from the boy of 7 to his father, and particularly the girls and their mother-puffed with evident pleasure on cigars. The Seminole does not grow tobacco, and the camp seemed to have none on hand.

SECTION 12. CASH INCOME

It is evident that many items listed as contributing to the comfort of this household on the edge of the Everglades imply dealings with the white world of commerce at Immokalee or Fort Myers. The cash income of this family is derived almost entirely from the sale of raccoon and alligator skins, buckskin, and an occasional otter. The women make a few dollars from the sale of Seminole dolls and a little very indifferent beadwork. Whitney is an unusually industrious hunter and probably takes in $300 a year from his pelts. In addition, he may get an opportunity to guide hunters for a couple of weeks each fall in the open season, at $6 a day for himself and oxcart, with a bonus of a ten dollar bill and a quart of liquor for killing the buck his employer could not hit.

Small as this cash income is, it would be ample if the bootleggers' portion could be converted into a fund to tide over the lean months of the year.

Whoever, in North America, earns his bread by hard manual effort in the lonely spots of the earth is prone to go on a spree when he hits town. This is true of lumberjacks, of miners, of cowboys, of trappers. It is painfully true of the Seminole. I never heard of Billy Fewell getting drunk, and the daughters are too young to have begun, but it is not uncommon for Whitney Cypress and his splendid squaw to come reeling into the Hendry County Reservation on their way home from Immokalee.