THE ABORIGINES. 



73 



Street, and would have twisted a cord as large as a clothes- 

 line, if that had been its use. The other one of the three 

 was dumped upon Border Street, one day, with a lot of 

 gravel from Edward E. Tower's gravel pit. 



One of the most interesting of the collection of Indian 

 relics is a fragment of soapstone, weighing about a third 

 of a pound. It is five eighths of an inch thick, and has 

 an even curvature that proves it to have been a part of a 

 kettle, such as the Indians used to cut out of the steatite 

 ledges of New England. The ear holes of one side happen 

 to be in this piece ; in fact, they are what drew the atten- 

 tion of the finder, saving the piece from the indifferent 

 fortune of common stones. This kettle must have been 

 brought from a distance by the Indians, perhaps from the 

 steatite ledge of Johnston, R. I., where more than sixty 

 little cavities in the rock show the exact spot where 

 many such kettles were worked out of that famous 

 quarry by the Indians. 



These three or four dozen stone implements, which have 

 lately been gathered by the writer for our town's collec- 

 tion, are probably but a small percentage of the many 

 which the white inhabitants have discovered in their two 

 hundred and fifty years of soil scratching; for fully half 

 of these have been found during the last ten years. How 

 many there may be still hiding their story from us can be 

 guessed by the amount of haphazard luck used in the dis- 

 covery of these. To a keen observer, every artificial 

 mark, where a chip of the stone was broken off in shaping 

 it, starts a long series of inferences back to the mind of the 

 maker, and his human or natural surroundings. 



How far one can look into the life of the aborigines 

 depends, therefore, very much upon his mental power of 

 tracing causes and effects in the human activity which 

 the circumstances of nature here occasioned. 



The date determined by the best glacial authorities for 

 the melting of the ice sheet leaves about seven thousand 



