A Window in Arcady 
fields. No wonder that Europeans have been inclined at 
times to grow this stately plant for ornament. Year after 
year it comes to us a gift of surpassing beauty and use¬ 
fulness out of the unknown, for its origin is an unsolved 
mystery. We know to-day no more whence it came than 
Hiawatha did, when, lying half-famished in his wigwam, 
he for the first time beheld it, in the shape of a youth, 
“Dressed in garments green and yellow, 
Coming through the purple twilight . . . 
From the Master of Life descending.” 
White men have never found it growing wild, and it 
would appear to have been a cultivated staple crop among 
the native peoples for centuries before the coming of Co¬ 
lumbus. The early white settlers in adopting it for their 
own use appropriated also the Indian ways of cooking it, 
though these, of course, have been much improved and ex¬ 
tended by Yankee ingenuity. 
The hulled corn of New England is practically the 
samp of the northern Indians, who beat the parched grains 
to remove the hull and boiled the kernels whole. Hominy 
in aboriginal cookery was a similar native preparation, but 
in this the grains were coarsely ground or cracked. The 
corn cakes known as tortillas, and familiar to every traveler 
in Spanish-American countries, are made from ripened corn 
that has first been soaked in lye of wood ashes to soften 
and remove the hulls and then rubbed into a meal be¬ 
tween two stones by Indian women to-day, probably just 
as their ancestors did 1000 years ago, for the same sort of 
stones are found in remains of prehistoric times in Mexico. 
[84] 
