e were at the island, three or four excavations were made and we
watched them all with interest. When the steel probe had located the
ruin, the digging and the excitement began. Slowly the buried walls
came to light. Within the walls was usually a mass of debris to be
thrown out--bricks of various sizes, shapes, and colours; cakes of the
ancient shell lime; pieces of charred wood, and relics of all sorts.
Some of the bricks were quite imperfectly made and had a greenish hue.
We supposed them to be the oldest ones and to have been baked or dried
in the sun before the colonists had kilns. Some of them had
indentations that were evidently finger imprints.

"I wants to fin' dey ole papahs," said big John, digging heartily. "Dis
hyer is a histoyacal ole place; an' I rathah fin' a box of dey ole
papahs than three hunderd dollahs."

Among the coloured people was an unquenchable hope of finding a pot
full of money.

It was a most interesting experience to sit in the brick rubbish and
watch for the queer little relics that were thrown out now and then. No
great finds were made, but the small ones did very well. There appeared
an endless number of pieces of broken pottery; and the design of a blue
dog chasing a blue fox was evidently a popular one for such ware in
James Towne.

But where was the blue dog's head? The question grew to be an absorbing
one. Each handful of dirt began or ended with a wrong piece of the blue
dog mixed with bits of brass and iron and pottery that brought vividly
to mind the scenes and the folk of that vanished village. Handful after
handful of dirt ran through our ringers like hourglass sands of ancient
days, and the clicking relics were left in our hands in the quest of
the blue dog's head.

And this was the way things went. A piece of a bowl bearing most of the
blue dog's tail; a woman's spur, gilt and broken, worn when merry eyes
peeped through silken riding masks; a bit of Indian pottery with
basketry marks upon it; a blue fox and the fore legs of the blue dog; a
shoe-buckle, silver too--must have been people of "qualitye" here; a
piece of a cream white cup that may have been a "lily pot" such as the
colonist kept his pipe tobacco in; pieces and pieces of the blue dog,
but never a bit of a head; a tiny red pipe and a piece of a white
one--so that must have been a "lily pot"; a door key, some rusty
scissors, and a blue head--of the fox; glass beads, blue beads, such as
John Smith told Powhatan