The cabinets contain many interesting memorials of the first settlers, their arms, implements, household furniture, and apparel. I refer the reader to the guide-books for an enumeration of them. The chairs of Governor Carver and of Elder Brewster are good specimens of the uncomfortable yet quaint furnishing of their time; as the capacious iron pots, pewter platters, and wooden trenchers are suggestive of a primitive people, whose town was a camp. I fancy there were few breakages among the dishes of these Pilgrims, for they were as hard as their owners; nor were there serious deductions to be made from the maids' wages on the day of reckoning. I confess I should have liked to see here, instead of the somewhat confusing jumble of articles pertaining to Pilgrim or Indian, an apartment exclusively devoted to the household economy of the first-comers, with furniture suitably arranged, and the evidences of their frugal housewifery garnishing the walls. [Illustration: MINCING-KNIFE.] [Illustration: PEREGRINE WHITE'S CABINET.] Many of the articles said to have been brought over in the _Mayflower_ are doubtless authentic, but the number of objects still existing and claiming some part of the immortality of that little bark would freight an Indiaman of good tonnage. There is a still pretty sampler, embroidered by the spider fingers of a Puritan maiden, with a sentiment worth the copying by any fair damsel in the land: "Lorea Standish is my name. Lord, guide my hart that I may doe thy will; Also fill my hands with such convenient skill As may conduce to virtue void of shame; And I will give the glory to thy name." [Illustration: STANDISH'S SWORD.] And here is the carnal weapon of Miles Standish, the living sword-blade of the colony. It lacks not much of an English ell from hilt to point, and looks still able to push its way in the world if well grasped. The weapon has a brass cross and guard, and resembles those trenchant Florentine blades of the sixteenth century, with its channels, curved point, and fine temper. The sword figures in Mr. Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish," where we may hear it clank at the captain's heels as he goes from his wrathful interview with John Alden, slamming the door after him, no doubt, like the tempestuous little tea-pot he was. The inscription on the blade has baffled the _savans_. For such a hot-tempered captain it should have been that engraved on the Earl of Shrewsbury's sword, "I am Talbot's, for to slay his foes." It could hardly have been this legend, with a point inscribed on a broadsword of the seventeenth century: "_Qui gladio ferit_ _Gladio perit._"