While these events were passing an important change took place in the commercial medium of the country. When the colonists first began to trade with the natives, they found them already advanced in their buyings and sellings from the primitive barter of product for product to the use of a fixed medium of exchange. This medium, indeed, was of a purely conventional character. There were neither mines of gold, nor mines of silver, nor mines of copper to perform the office of money. But the waters of their rivers and bays yielded an abundant supply of shells, and these they wrought with much ingenuity into beads; the periwinkle furnishing the material for the lower values, six of its white shells being held at an English penny, while the dark eye of the quahog or round clam, smoothed by grinding, and polished and drilled, was rated at twice the value of the white shell. Both were known as wampum or peage. As money belts of wampum were counted by the fathom, three hundred and sixty of the white passing for five shillings sterling, and a fathom of the black being worth twice as much as a fathom of the white. Like the metallic medium of other countries they served also for personal decoration, supplying the Indian belles and beaux with their necklaces and bracelets, and princes with the most valued ornaments of their regalia. When used for this purpose they were wrought into girdles, or worn as a scarf about the shoulders, great pains being taken and not a little skill displayed in arranging the colors in various figures. The mints in which this primitive money was coined were on the sea-shore, where shells were found in great abundance, and so well was this simple article adapted to the wants and the tastes of the aborigines that it passed current six hundred miles from the coast, and was used by the colonists in all their bargains with the natives. But shells like metals and paper are subject to the same inexorable laws of trade. When beaver skins became plenty in the colonial market and wampum was made in larger quantities, it fell from ten shillings a fathom to five, and the Indian hunter thought it hard that an equal number of furs should bring him but half as much wampum as before. Like all money, also, wampum was liable to be counterfeited, and even in that rude commerce there were men who preferred the ill-gotten gain of the counterfeiter to the fruit of honest industry. Fortunately for the native he was quick in detecting the fraud, and never failed to exact full compensation. But wampum, like the race for whom it was made, was unable to hold its ground against the advancing civilization. We have seen it reduced to half its original value by overissues and the increasing supply of furs in the colonial market. Gradually it began to disappear. Rhode Island continued to use it long after it had ceased to be current in colonies where the intercourse with Europe was more direct. Massachusetts had begun to coin silver in