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378

THE prisoners experience the most opposite fates. Some, with strange contradiction to all the ideas and customs of civilized nations, are adopted into various families, and, from enemies, become, at once, fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, and enter into all the nearest relations of life. Others are reserved for the utmost extremities of torture which ingenuity can invent, and cruelty can inflict. A few whom they despise too much either to adopt, or to torment, are reduced to slavery to assist their women in those labors of drudgery to which the sex is destined by the customs of savage life.

But, before such distribution is made, they undergo a severe and extraordinary kind of discipline in every village through which they pass after they enter into the territories of their conquerors, or of their allies. Each village consists of a double line of huts extended along a single street. At the end of the street the prisoners are collected in order to run a most teazing and distressing kind of gauntlet, between two rows of young men who are ranged for the purpose along either side, and are armed with sticks, and stones, and hard balls composed of gravel and clay. With these the unhappy runners are bruised and beaten in a miserable manner.

379

But, before these races are begun, which afford a barbarous sport to their youth, and even to their children, who are permitted to mingle in the amusement, to accustom their minds betimes to acts of ferocity, frequently it happens that women, or old men who have lost their nearest relation by disease, or by war, and who now feel the want of their assistance in their domestic occupations, will select a part of the prisoners whom they resolve to adopt in the room of the deceased. This act so contradictory to the natural ferocity of savage passions, however surprising it may seem, appears to be very sincerely entered into by both parties, and immediately puts an end to all further injury towards the capture. The adopted enemy is received as a countryman and kinsman; and they transfer to him all the rights, and good offices to which the dead was entitled. The rest are obliged to course it through their cruel gauntlet. If, int he progress of the race, some bruised and beaten victim of their sport, discouraged with the frequency and violence of the blows which he receives, breaks through the line of his persecutors, and endeavours to seek a shelter in some cabin, the females of the family will frequently interpose to skreen him from further suf-

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