172 Singing Valleys 



throp at New London. Some are still used as corn mills, others 

 have been incorporated in the small factories which make the 

 rivers of New England the busiest waters in the world. 



Isolated settlers devised a sweep-mortar, made of a hol- 

 lowed tree-stump and a convenient sapling to whose top the 

 wooden pestle was affixed. Jerks on a rope worked the pestle 

 and sent loud thumps reverberating through the woods. These 

 sweep-mortars were so common on Long Island that sailors, 

 lost in a fog on the Sound, listened for the sound of them 

 as a warning. 



The Dutch patroons on their Hudson River patents built 

 mills on all the little kills. It was a sawmill "de Zaagaertje" 

 which gave its name, onomatopoetically, to Saugerties. 



One pair, at least, of the three sets of gristing-stones which 

 the Fauna brought to the Fort on The Rocks in 1644, went 

 into the mill which the Swedes built on the creek they called 

 "SkoldpaddekiH" (Turtle Creek) which flows into the Brandy- 

 wine at its confluence with the Delaware. This is now within 

 the limits of the city of Wilmington. That mill continued 

 in operation for more than two centuries. No doubt Dutch 

 Molly, the hominy-seller of Wilmington and who probably 

 was Swedish, got her supplies there. She was a famous figure 

 in the town; a hawker who might have stepped from a Hogarth 

 print, fat and blowsy, with a wink for a likely looking lad, 

 and a bawdy jest on the tip of her tongue. Decorous Wilming- 

 ton housewives spoke of her as "that dreadful woman," and 

 shuddered when her hoarse cry, "Hot corn! Hot corn! 'Ere's 

 yer lily-white hot corn!" sounded under their windows. But 

 they sent the servant out with a bowl and a coin for Molly's 

 wares, nevertheless. 



Millstones were part of the cargo of every ship coming to 

 the colonies. Most of these were quarried in France, from 

 buhrstone, a silicious quartz found in the Eocene formation of 

 the Paris basin. The Romans had gone to Andernach on the 

 Rhine for their millstones, and in England the stone-cutting 

 works of Notts and Sussex were listed among the country's 



