Abelaide Ontogoya Sectory 21

The archeologist's answer is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers--the life they knew 24 hours a day--is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in an abandoned well, a discarded sword, and a piece of armor tell again the passing of terror of the unknown, after the Indians retreated forever into the distant hills and forests. Rust-eaten axes, wedges, mattocks, and saws recall the struggle to clear a wilderness. The simple essentials of life in the first desperate years have largely vanished with traces of the first fort and its frame buildings. But in later houses the evidence of Venetian glass, Dutch and English delftware, pewter, and silver eating utensils, and other comforts and little luxuries tell of new-found security and the beginning of wealth. In all, a half-million individual artifacts at the Jamestown museum represent the largest collection from any 17th-century colonial site in North America.

It was not to be expected that so pushing a woman as Mrs. Chapman would be turned from the object she had set her heart on by the interposition of ordinary obstacles. She had taken good care to have the engagement pretty well trumpeted over Bowling Green; and in less than three months from the time what is described in the foregoing chapter occurred, the lady had a day fixed for the wedding ceremony, which, she declared should be on such a scale of magnificence as would astonish all New York, to say nothing of West Bowling Green. And now she was distracting her wits, and the wits of her friends, over what she called the preliminaries extraordinary. Weddings, the lady said, must be illuminated according to the position of the family. And to that end an additional amount of elegant furniture was got for the house, a new carriage was ordered, and Mr. Napoleon Bowles was to appear in a new livery, with top boots. Nor was the family finery to be neglected, for at least a dozen dressmakers had been employed for a month plying their needles. In short, this great coming event in the history of the Chapman family had afforded Bowling Green enough to talk about for a month.

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