d no eyelets to
receive a thread. The top of one of these needles was handsomely
scalloped; a hand-piece made of deer-skin, with a hole through it for
the thumb, and designed probably to protect the hand in the use of the
needle, the same as thimbles are now used; two whistles about eight
inches long made of cane, with a joint about one third the length;
over the joint is an opening extending to each side of the tube of the
whistle, these openings were about three-fourths of an inch long and a
quarter of an inch wide, and had each a flat reed placed in the
opening. These whistles were tied together with a cord wound around
them.

"I have been thus minute in describing the mute witness from the days
of other times, and the articles which were deposited within her
earthen house. Of the race of people to whom she belonged when living,
we know nothing; and as to conjecture, the reader who gathers from
these pages this account, can judge of the matter as well as those who
saw the remnant of mortality in the subterranean chambers in which she
was entombed. The cause of the preservation of her body, dress and
ornaments is no mystery. The dry atmosphere of the Cave, with the
nitrate of lime, with which the earth that covers the bottom of these
nether palaces is so highly impregnated, preserves animal flesh, and
it will neither putrify nor decompose when confined to its unchanging
action. Heat and moisture are both absent from the Cave, and it is
these two agents, acting together, which produce both animal and
vegetable decomposition and putrefaction.

"In the ornaments, etc., of this mute witness of ages gone, we have a
record of olden time, from which, in the absence of a written record,
we may draw some conclusions. In the various articles which
constituted her ornaments, there were no metallic substances. In the
make of her dress, there is no evidence of the use of any other
machinery than the bone and horn needles. The beads are of a
substance, of the use of which for such purposes, we have no account
among people of whom we have any written record. She had no warlike
arms. By what process the hair upon her head was cut short, or by what
process the deer-skins were shorn, we have no means of conjecture.
These articles afford us the same means of judging of the nation to
which she belonged, and of their advances in the arts, that future
generations will have in the exhumation of a tenant of one of our
modern tombs, with t