ful a day."

It was held to be the most nourishing food known, and in the smallest
and most condensed form. Both Indians and white men usually carried it
in a pouch when they went on long journeys, and mixed it with snow in
the winter and water in summer. Gookin says it was sweet, toothsome, and
hearty. With only this nourishment the Indians could carry loads "fitter
for elephants than men." Roger Williams says a spoonful of this meal and
water made him many a good meal. When we read this we are not surprised
that the Pilgrims could keep alive on what is said was at one time of
famine their food for a day,--five kernels of corn apiece. The apostle
Eliot, in his Indian Bible, always used the word nookick for the English
words flour or meal.

We ought to think of the value of food in those days; and we may be sure
the governor and his council thought corn of value when they took it for
taxes and made it a legal currency just like gold and silver, and
forbade any one to feed it to pigs. If you happen to see the price of
corn during those years down to Revolutionary times, you will, perhaps,
be surprised to see how much the price varied. From ten shillings a
bushel in 1631, to two shillings in 1672, to twenty in 1747, to two in
1751, and one hundred shillings at the opening of the Revolution. In
these prices of corn, as in the price of all other articles at this
time, the difference was in the money, which had a constantly changing
value, not in the article itself or its usefulness. The corn had a
steady value, it always furnished just so much food; and really was a
standard itself rather than measured and valued by the poor and shifting
money.

There are many other interesting facts connected with the early culture
of corn: of the finding hidden in caves or "caches" in the ground the
Indian's corn which he had stored for seed; of the sacred "corn-dances"
of the Indians; that the first patent granted in England to an American
was to a Philadelphia woman for a mill to grind a kind of hominy; of
the great profit to the colonists in corn-raising, for the careless and
greedy Indians always ate up all their corn as soon as possible, then
had to go out and trap beavers in the woods to sell the skins to the
colonists for corn to keep them from starving. One colonist planted
about eight bushels of seed-corn. He raised from this eight hundred and
sixty-four bushels of corn, which he sold to the Indians for beaver
skins which gave