A WIND-MILL

about four bushels of corn, yellow, red and blue,
the first they had ever set eyes on. And they took
it after much deliberation — it was really stealing
— having resolved to pay the Indians the first op-

portunity, which, I am glad to say, they did.

The poor colonists had times when it was hard

' to get anything to eat, and but for corn and learn-

ing from the savages how to cook it, they would
have starved. They bought hogsheads of it from
them one season, which the squaws brought down
in canoes; and friendly Squanto and Massassoit
entertained the leaders with mazium, made of the
meal mixed with water, which they called nokehihe,
and introduced them to the knowledge of sams,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

:

AT NANTUCKET. “THE ONE OLD MILL THAT IS LEFT.”

hominy, suppawn and succotash— the last made of
whole kernels boiled with beans, but the others all
of pounded or cracked corn, for which they had

" quite a ways out to sea,

PILGRIMAGE. 137
large mortars hollowed’ out of hard-wood logs.

The white men improved upon the aboriginal
method and fashioned nice mortars; and great

  

KING PHILIP’s SAMP BOWL. (From the Mass. Hist. Societg
: Collection.)
was the thumping with pestles of wood or stone
along that line of houses where Leyden street is,
till times were favorable for a wind-mill to be built.
Hundreds of those styles of mortars, either of iron,
“or wood, or stone, may now be found in old houses
or in museums scattered about New England. In -
a bric-a-brac store at Nantucket they show one
made of lignum-vite, which looks as if it might
bear constant use for two hundred years to come,
Mrs. Austen says in her MWantucket Scraps that

_ “the women ‘got tired of grinding samp” in those

and hand-mills; and that some man thought the
matter over, and then went to bed and dreamed it
over, and dreamed out a wind-mill, and went to
work and built one.

There used to be three there, back of the town,
on the Mill hills, as they were called, high up,
waving their great arms so that they could be seen
In the Revolutionary.
times, the islanders hit upon the happy plan of
using the mills to telegraph to the ships in the
harbor if British cruisers were around. A set of
signals was fixed upon and the vanes were made
to indicate how matters stood.

A woman, who told us about one, said she was
sorry enough when it was gone, for she and her.
schoolmates used to play around there; “and we
used to go up there when I was a girl,” she said,
“to get corn to parch. We never heard of pop-
corn then. It was the common yellow corn. We
used to beg it, we schoolgirls, and carry it home
and put it in a frying-pan over the fire, and when
there was one white one we were so pleased; and
one girl had that, and then another would have
the next one,” ‘