Colony” garrets.  Pots and kettles of all sorts find more frequent mention in the early inventories than anything else, except muskets and swords, and were probably more numerous upon the ship than any other cooking utensil.  A few claimed to be from the Pilgrim ship are exhibited, chief of which is a large iron pot, said to have been “brought by Myles Standish in the may-Flower,” now owned by the Pilgrim Society.

Hardly an early Pilgrim inventory but includes “a mortar and pestle,” sometimes of iron, sometimes of “brass” or “belle-mettle” (bell metal).  They were of course, in the absence of mills, and for some purposes for which small hand mills were not adapted, prime necessities, and every house hold had one.  A very fine one of brass (with an iron pestle), nine and a half inches across its bell-shaped top,—­exhibited by the Pilgrim Society, and said to have been “brought in the may-Flower by Edward Winslow,”—­seems to the author as likely to have been so as almost any article for which that distinction is claimed.

The lighting facilities of the Pilgrims were fewer and cruder than those for cooking.  They possessed the lamp of the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews, with but few improvements,—­a more or less fanciful vessel for oil, with a protuberant nose for a wick, and a loose-twisted cotton wick.  Hand-lamps of this general form and of various devices, called “betty-lamps,” were commonly used, with candlesticks of various metals, —­iron, brass, silver, and copper,—­though but few of any other ware.  For wall-lighting two or more candle sockets were brought together in “sconces,” which were more or less elaborate in design and finish.  One of the early writers (Higginson) mentions the abundance of oil (from fish) available for lamps, but all tallow and suet used by the early colonists was, for some years (till cattle became plentiful), necessarily imported.  Some of the “candle-snuffers” of the “first comers” doubtless still remain.  We may be sure every family had its candles, “betty-lamps,” candlesticks, and “snuffers.”  “Lanthorns” were of the primitive, perforated tin variety—­only “serving to make darkness visible” now found in a few old attics in Pilgrim towns, and on the “bull-carts” of the peons of Porto Rico, by night.  Fire, for any purpose, was chiefly procured by the use of flint, steel, and tinder, of which many very early specimens exist.  Buckets, tubs, and pails were, beyond question, numerous aboard the ship, and were among the most essential and highly valued of Pilgrim utensils.  Most, if not all of them, we may confidently assert, were brought into requisition on that Monday “wash-day” at Cape Cod, the first week-day after their arrival, when the women went ashore to do their long-neglected laundrying, in the comparatively fresh water of the beach pond at Cape Cod harbor.  They are frequently named in the earliest inventories.  Bradford also mentions the filling of a “runlet” with