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stream you ordinarily keep to is a bit for the good walking, at least start across, but here you went square across, as you would tear a piece of cloth. I suppose that was a striking thing to the early Indians about cloth, it would tear straight, you know how many skins taken [?], "tear-cloth-river" was the answer, hardly for us vocabulary people to reach.

Down here the matta- forms are not so bad, are apt to be labelled [question mark superscribed over the double l] by the rest of the name; our fierce [?] adjectives are mon- [letter N superscribed] & squan- [letter N superscribed]; they are very slowly emerging somewhat.

Your shaman talk touches a field I have wandered in from the first. These things are hard to be definite about. Various names of early chiefs show the - ando, or -anto of manitú. The idea shades down nearly to a plain superlative, we say (north) manitu Káshu, he works very hard, "Táo manitú!" my man let off in a scrap with an unusually large pike he was trying to get alongside. Everything that has entity, to a boulder, has its manitu. The atshákush, soul, is another matter. It is something to keep on terms with them all, as needs be: the (Indian) soul is exacting in some ways, & as one may have two or three one needs awareness. Yet beliefs don't seem to me so very different, whatever of accessories. I've a lot of notes on this. Thirty years old & never gone over.

Your eye for the historical side in all these doings, name doings, abases me; what I come to of it I slide off.

Very faithfully yours

W.B. Cabot

[Postscript inscribed along the left margin:] Many thanks about the Aubery etc.; I should suppose there would be photostat facilities in Portland, if one could stand the cost.