These people do not respect the Sabbath.[30] The parties who came
in, on New Year's day, still linger about the settlements, and appear to
be satisfied to suffer hunger half the time, if their wants can be
gratuitously relieved the other half.
[Footnote 30: About eighteen months afterwards, I interdicted all visits
of Indians on the _Sabbath_, and adopted it as an invariable rule, that
I would not transact any business, or receive visits, from any Indian
under the influence of liquor. I directed my interpreter to tell them
that the President had sent me to speak to _sober_ men only.]
_20th_. I continued to transcribe, from loose papers, into my Indian
lexicon. A large proportion of the words are derivatives. All are, more
or less, compounded in their oral forms, and they appear to be _glued_,
as it were, to objects of sense. This is not, however, peculiar to this
language. The author of "Hermes" says--"The first words of men, like
their first ideas, had an immediate reference to sensible objects, and
that in after days, when they began to discern with their intellect,
they took those words which they found already made, and transferred
them, by metaphor, to intellectual conceptions.
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