You remember, when you were children, looking over the old story-book handed down to you by the Puritan fathers, that one of the conundrums with which the gayety of their times was illustrated was, "Who was the shortest man in the Bible?" The answer was, "Bildad, the Shuhite;" but now, in the revised text it is Peter, because Peter said: "Silver and gold have I none," and no one could be shorter than that. The North American Indian was no better off than Peter in his gold reserve or silver supply; but he managed to get along with the quahog clam. That was the money substance out of which he made the wampum, and the shell-heaps scattered over the island are mute monuments to an industry which was blasted by the demonetization of the hard-shell clam. Wampum was a good money in the Indian civilization. It was the product of human labor as difficult and tedious as the labor of the gold-miner of to-day. It had intrinsic value, for it was redeemable in anything the Indian had to give, from his skill in the chase to his squaw. It took time, patience, endurance and skill to make a thing of beauty out of a clam, even in the eyes of an Indian, but when the squaws and the old men had ground down the tough end of the shell to the size of a wheat straw, and had bored it with a sliver of flint, and strung it upon a thew of deerskin, and tested its smoothness on the noses, they had an article which had as much power over an Indian mind as a grain of gold to-day has over us. There were two kinds of wampum, the blue and the white. The Montauks to this day know that there is a difference between the two. The blue came from our clam. The white, which was the product of the periwinkle, did not need so much labor to fit it for use as wampum, and it was cheaper. The blue was the gold; the white was the silver. One blue bead was worth two white ones. The Indians did not try to keep up any parity of the beads. They let each kind go for just what it was worth. The Puritans used to restring the beads and keep the blue ones. Then the Indians strung their scalps.