us advances,
the captain leaving three men on guard permitted the rest to extinguish
their matches and explore the wigwams so curious to European eyes and so
familiar to our own.

The interior of each showed a cooking hearth or platform framed of
sticks and stones, and an assortment of wooden cooking utensils rudely
carved. Among these the explorers noticed an English bucket without a
bale and a copper kettle, both linking themselves in their minds to the
traces of civilization already noted in the palisades and ruined cabin
near which the store of corn had been found. Many baskets, both for use
and ornament, were found, and sundry boxes curiously wrought with bits
of clam shell, such as were used for wampum, and also little crab shells
and colored pebbles, seemed to show the presence of women and their
proficiency in the fancy work of their own time and taste. Several deer
heads, one of them freshly killed, showed that the inmates of the
wigwams were not far distant, and in a hollow tree by way of larder was
hung the carcass of a deer, so well ripened that even Hopkins pronounced
it "fitter for dogs than men."

From all these novelties and curiosities the Pilgrims selected a few of
the prettier specimens to carry to their comrades on board, formally
promising each other, as they had in case of the corn, to make due
payment to the owners whenever they should be found, a promise most
conscientiously performed at a later day.

By the time these matters were fully examined night was falling, and
the Pilgrims, strong in their own good intentions and also in their
weapons, encamped a short distance from the Indian village, and although
keeping diligent guard all night saw nor heard naught to disturb their
slumbers. Rousing betimes next morning, their first attention was given
to prayers, and their next to making as good a breakfast as possible
with the aid of some wild fowl and little birds shot during the previous
day's march, and then the "meat and mass" which "hinder no man" thus
attended to, they set forth in the direction of the river where they
were to be picked up by the shallop. Toward noon this point was nearly
reached, in fact the clearing with the European cabin was close at hand,
when Billington paused beside a mound carefully laid up with a border of
beach stones and rounded high and smooth with sods, over which were laid
hewn planks such as composed the cabin.

"It is another store of corn of choicer variet