Spinning-wheels and hand-looms were such absolute necessities, and were so familiar and omnipresent features of the lives and labors of the Pilgrim housewives and their Dutch neighbors of Leyden, that we should be certain that they came with the Pilgrims, even if they did not find mention in the earliest Pilgrim inventories. Many ancient ones are exhibited in the "Old Colony," but it is not known that it is claimed for any of them that they came in the first ship. It is probable that some of the "cheese fatts" and churns so often named in early inventories came in the ship, though at first there was, in the absence of milch kine, no such use for them as there had been in both England and Holland, and soon was in New England. Among cooking utensils the roasting "spit" was, in one form or another, among the earliest devices for cooking flesh, and as such was an essential of every household. Those brought by the Plymouth settlers were probably, as indicated by the oldest specimens that remain to us, of a pretty primitive type. The ancient "bake-kettle" (sometimes called "pan"), made to bury in the ashes and thus to heat above and below, has never been superseded where resort must be had to the open fire for cooking, and (practically unchanged) is in use to-day at many a sheep- herder's and cowboy's camp fire of the Far West. We may be sure that it was in every MAY-FLOWER family, and occasional ancient specimens are yet to be found in "Old 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.