on removing the stones, it was found that this work of defense was not a solid wall, but a series of crypts or stone graves, constructed by planting broad, flat stones perpendicularly in the sand and covering them with others of the same kind laid across them. These rude tombs were entirely empty. Not a bone or tooth remained; so great was the lapse of time since the bodies of the honored dead had been laid in these secure vaults that not a vestige of them survived but blotches of dark dust upon the yellow sand. On either side of the primitive coffins, but not contiguous to them, were traces of fire, and with ashes and charcoal were noticed calcined bones, small cubes of galena, and broken flints and pottery. The destruction cf the great mound yielded many rare and fine implements and ornaments of stone and shell, which no one thought to preserve; and no one thought to observe whether they had been interred with the dead at the base of the tumulus or with those buried upon its surface. Among the many relics unearthed, one particularly fine axe of polished stone is remembered, having a groove cut around the middle and a cutting edge on each end; also three pestle-shaped objects of beautifully polished porphyry 20 inches long, 2½ or 3 inches in diameter, rounded at one end and pointed at the other.
Seven miles east of Beardstown, up the Sangamon, and quite near it, at Mound Lake, is a conspicuous landmark known as "the Mound;" a ridge-like elevation 40 feet high by 60 yards in width, and 400 feet in length. This mound has never been explored, and may be of artificial origin; but I am strongly inclined to regard it a natural formation (like the great Cahokia mound and other similar elevations in the American Bottom), merely an outlier of the loess or bluff formation left there in the primal erosion of the river valley. It is situated in the edge of the timber, on the bank of a small lake, 3 miles from the bluffs, and in the midst of the finest fishing and hunting district, even in this day, to be found in Illinois. Whether or not the Indians raised this mound is a question to be determined by future investigation, but there is no doubt of their having used it as a place of resort and camping ground for a great length of time. Although it has been in cultivation for many years, traces of camp-fires are yet seen all over it, and its surface and the adjoining fields are yet littered with potsherds, flint chips, and decayed bones and teeth of wild animals. One of the very few entire pieces of pottery ever recovered in this county was plowed up with some human bones on this mound in the early history of its cultivation. It was a globular earthen vessel, 10 or 12 inches in diameter, marked externally as usual with the impression of the fabric in which it was moulded or sustained while drying. A similar vessel, but smaller, was plowed up unbroken in a field a few miles east of this place a few years later. At a point about midway the lake-side base of the mound I discovered, some years ago, the remains of a kiln in which the savages had burned their pottery. It was an excavation in its side, almost circular and 4 feet in diameter, an old-fashioned lime-kiln in miniature, with walls burned
