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THE MINT AT PASCACK.

ONEY is a queer thing. The world was a great while in coming to the use of gold and silver coin, and longer yet in making up its mind to greenbacks. By and by, when gold ceases to be king among the precious metals, when it becomes a commoner, what do you think will represent to us the highest value as a circulating medium? "You, nor I, nor no one knows."

I suppose that every young lady of ten, and every young gentleman of twelve, has, at one time or another in the course of his or her career, been allowed to write an Essay on the Fortunes of a Cent, and it is a first-class subject. But I, unfortunately, find the door of fancy shut in my face; I am not to be allowed this day to report on any imaginary adventures, nor shall I attempt to tell the story of coins in general, how one thing and another, from a sheep to a shell, has been used since the Deluge, I mean since the Creation, among Egyptians, Jews, and Romans, Goths, Saxons, and American Indians, in the great business of exchange.

I am going to tell you about money, though, and about the mint at Pascack.

Suppose you visit it with me. I shall not then feel that I am like unfortunate lecturers who have the hour all to themselves, and when they get through know to a certainty that certain of the audience will say that they have been bored. If you go with me, and see things for yourself, I shall not be responsible for anything except for getting you through the fog and along the country roads as swiftly as possible; and it will be your own fault, or the fault of the mint, if you are not interested.

While you are making yourself comfortable in your corner of the sleigh, and you need not hurry, for old Tom will stand still as long as you please, — he has a name for coming to a stand, — I will merely say that in the days of John Jacob Astor (father of the Astor House and the Astor Library in New York, two fine institutions), and in the days of the Hudson Bay Company, when traffic with the Indians was carried on much more extensively than it is now, from Hackensack up the valley of the Hudson River for a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, all the way you would have found moneymaking establishments resembling this which we are about to visit; and not one of them is now in operation except this one at Pascack. You must go to Rome if you want to see the Pope, and to Pascack if you want to see how wampum is made.

When I say that all this distance of fifteen or twenty miles you might have found these works, do not imagine that there was a continuous row of stately buildings in which the coining was going on night and day; that complicated machinery was set up in them, such as you may find in that great institution in Philadelphia, where you may see specimens of all the coins used as circulating medium among the civilized nations. The mills

were as poor, the machinery as crude, as the folk for whom they were worked.

Ten miles through the cold sea-fog, along a road to whose windings there seems to be no end, and we are at Pascack. It is a mere hamlet, you perceive. Yonder great stone church, with its square, squat, wooden tower, flanked by a graveyard which is crowded with memorial stones, can be none other than a Dutch Reformed Church, for we have been riding all the way between the thatched barns, stone walls, well-poles, and stone houses of the substantial old Dutch farmers. Around the church and the blacksmith's shop is a collection of houses, some of them a hundred years old, and built of stone, of course, for of that material, farmers say, there is no dearth in Rockland County.

Turning down a lane which leads us past the graveyard, we approach the mint, or the mill.

The little red frame building stands, as you perceive, on the borders of a creek; shadowed beautifully it must be in summer-time by those overarching trees. We pass by heaps of conch-shells as we approach; their beautiful red lips are visible through the light veil of snow thrown over them, you say it looks like the white sea-foam, — yes, but no single wave of the deep ever swept such a harvest of shells to the shore; time, money, human hands, have been needed to accomplish that. They make a pretty show, these pyramids of treasure from the deep. Out of their element as they are, and doomed to destruction, it seems as though they must find some satisfaction in the company of their kind. Do they hear the turning of the wheels, do you think? and the grinding of the grindstones?

Old Tom is as ready to stop, as we to rein him in, and so let us hurry into the mill.

The warmth inside strikes you pleasantly, and we have a civil welcome from the three white faces, and the one black one, turned towards us. But I see that you are looking around you with a little dismay. I can only improve the moment by saying, that the next time when you visit a place where men work in shirt-sleeves with leathern aprons and overalls, it would be wise not to go in your best. If you are going to walk on Broadway, wear, of course, a silk dress with a trail a yard in length, or, if you ride on the Avenue or in the Park, by no means protect yourself from cold as absurdly as the driver does; but when you go into a workshop where all things are in keeping with the work that is done there, don't go arrayed in a splendor which will annoy a kindly workman when he sees you covered with dust, and daubed with lime and water.

The man by the window who is standing by a grindstone in motion as we enter, with what looks like a clay-pipe handle in his hand, comes toward us, and is a little uncertain as to the occasion of our visit. He looks at you. Say you want to buy a grindstone, or I will say it for you, for I saw half a dozen outside the door as we came in, and a grindstone is a useful article. If you should answer, he might smile, but he will see at once that a grindstone would prove of great service to me, farm-hand that I am.

We quickly make our bargain, and then it comes out, quite naturally, that we have a curiosity concerning the works.

The works! they are before us, four grindstones ranged in a row, a rude table connected with each, the stones moved by water-power; the broad black strap beyond there is the "connecting link" which keeps all in motion. We look around us, a little incredulous; what we had expected to see we don't exactly know, but it was something different from this.

The winter afternoon, short at longest, is wearing away, however, and we have no time now to waste in reflecting on the downfall of our "great expectations." It is clear to us that if we are to know any more about wampum than we did when we came, we must begin to ask questions. So I will venture first.

"Do you work here all the year round?" I say, addressing the middleaged man of whom I bought the stone. He makes me think of Hugh Miller as I look at his noble face, and meet the glance of his intelligent eyes as they look at me from under the shaggy brows so well powdered with white dust. He rolls the pipe in his fingers, and slowly answers, "Not generally in summer, but sometimes. That depends on orders."

"Orders! why, where do they come from?" you ask, surprised to think that the poor Indians should order anything, they for whom all things have been ordered, and so cruelly too, by white men.

"From Baltimore,

"O, they come from anywhere a'most," he answers. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, wherever the traders are fitting out." "The traders! it is they who want the wampum then, and who order it, as a nurse orders things for the baby she is taking care of!"

The man laughs; he thinks it is a baby rather hard to manage whom the government has undertaken to look after through its agents.

"Where do you get all these shells from?" we both ask together, for we were equally surprised to see the heaps of them as we came along. "From the Indies."

"Do you import, yourselves?" and I think it a foolish question, these men in this mill importers! To my surprise he answers, "Yes," and then how the walls of the little shop expand! The place puts on new dignity, or rather, we see it in a new light. These men of the mint, in their woollen shirts, and leathern aprons, and coarse overalls, are importers for the nations of red-men.

"Will you please to show us the different kinds of wampum you make here?" I ask.

Thereupon one of the brothers- there are four of them who carry on this business which their father and mother, their grandfather and grandmother, with "all their folks," carried on before them in their time- produces from under the stairs which lead to a grist-mill in the loft, a rude basket filled with exquisite specimens of haliotis. They are large and perfect, the exterior coat rough as oyster-shells when brought to the mint, but within, beautiful as a fairy's grotto. The exterior of these had been treated by the workmen until, the rough outer coat quite removed, a surface was revealed, vying

with the inner in beauty. These, as "red airs," "yellow airs," "silvers," etc., have recently come into considerable demand as wampum. We find in the old pailful of splendors which is also produced for our inspection, a specimen of mother-of-pearl destined to glisten on the brow of some Indian brave, or that of some dusky princess; out of it a dozen card-cases might have been fashioned.

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And these are specimens of moon-wampum, - delicate rose leaves they look like, some of them. They are all oval-shaped, you perceive, and secured together by a red cord; a hole is drilled through the middle, and they are arranged in stacks of three and five, like table-mats, the larger piece three inches in length perhaps, and the smaller, one. The group of three represents ninety cents; that of five, a dollar and a half. The moon wampum, and the hair-pipe wampum, we are told, are both from the conch-shell. The hair-pipe wampum, which is now in great demand, the heads of savages as well as the heads of the civilized in our day receiving special attention of fashion, looks like a very simple affair, does it not? I say to the man who, with such care, is polishing a bit an inch and a half in length, that it looks very much like the handle of a common clay pipe. "Woe to the trader who should attempt to deceive an Indian by passing off clay pipe on him for this!" he answers. "The red men are very particular about the hair-pipe wampum," he continues. "It must be drilled with exactness, and polished smoothly as possible, or the white man will have the worst of it. That is, he would have the worst of it, I suppose, if he did n't always have the best of it, in dealing with savages."

"The best of it!" you exclaim, thinking of the lives of noble young men which have been lost in the wars with the Indians within your memory, young though you be.

"Yes, in the matter of barter," he answers. "It is another thing, though, when the wild blood is on fire, and the white man comes as a victim in the way of the Indian. Then his craft has the advantage, for he stops at nothing; and the trader finds, too, that if he goes a little too far in his over-reaching, his government will inquire into his conduct. He is pretty careful, though, to go as far as he can, and he will even run dangerous risks sometimes, for government has winked at so much wrong-doing in the tribes of agents, why should n't it wink at his ?"

While he is speaking another brother brings a bunch of wampum to show us, which was made from the black eye of clam-shells. The strings are about a foot in length, as you see, and the beads an inch long. They are very prettily marked, and look like agates. This bunch, numbering 3,050 beads, is valued at fifteen dollars. This kind of wampum has only recently come into use.

The material for the hair-pipe wampum is cut from the conch-shell, the man tells us again, turning our attention to the bit he was working at when we came in. It is first sawed, or broken into straight blocks, an inch in diameter, and then worked down to the requisite size on the grindstone.

You wish to know how the hole running through the length of the clay