ten or a dozen in the morning and returned at night well laden with fish which the next day was dried and cured on platforms of boughs beneath which fires of green wood burned. The squaws also gathered flags for the later weaving of mats and baskets. The mats were used more often than skins for the walls of their houses. Many other uses were found for them, and they were dyed by the women in several colors. Corn was beginning to tassel and the squashes—planted wherever a pocket of soil allowed the dropping of the queer flat seeds—showed great yellow blossoms. There was much work for the women, to whom fell what cultivation was done in the straggling garden patches. Also, it became their duty to see that pits were dug for the autumn storing of the corn, and to line them well with bark. The men, it seemed to David, worked not at all, unless hunting and trapping might be called labor. Even fishing they left to the squaws. Occasionally one could be found hammering an ornament from a piece of metal, or, maybe, fashioning arrows or bows or spears. As for wampumpeag, or wampum as the English called it, it seemed that the Wachoosetts made none themselves, but bartered for it
