Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during,my childhood;they were kept up in these old towns longer than elsewhere.We used tallow candles and oil lamps,and sat by open fireplaces.There was always a tinder-box in some safe corner or other,and fire was kindled by striking flint and steel upon the tinder.What magic it seemed to me,when I was first allowed to strike that wonderful spark,and light the kitchen fire!
The fireplace was deep,and there was a "settle"in the chimney corner,where three of us youngest girls could sit together and toast our toes on the andirons (two Continental soldiers in full uniform,marching one after the other),while we looked up the chimney into a square of blue sky,and sometimes caught a snow-flake on our foreheads;or sometimes smirched our clean aprons (high-necked and long sleeved ones,known as "tiers")against the swinging crane with its sooty pot-hooks and trammels.
The coffee-pot was set for breakfast over hot coals,on a three-legged bit of iron called a "trivet."Potatoes were roasted in the ashes,and the Thanksgiving turkey in a "tin-kitchen,"the business of turning the spit being usually delegate to some of us,small folk,who were only too willing to burn our faces in honor of the annual festival.
There were brick ovens in the chimney corner,where the great bakings were done;but there was also an iron article called a "Dutch oven,"in which delicious bread could be baked over the coals at short notice.And there was never was anything that tasted better than my mother's "firecake,"--a short-cake spread on a smooth piece of board,and set up with a flat-iron before the blaze,browned on one side,and then turned over to be browned on the other.(It required some sleight of hand to do that.)If I could only be allowed to blow the bellows--the very old people called them "belluses"--when the fire began to get low,I was a happy girl.
Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion,but they were clumsy affairs,and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that which was done by an open fire.We younger ones reveled in the warm,beautiful glow,that we look back to as to a remembered sunset.There is no such home-splendor now.
When supper was finished,and the tea-kettle was pushed back on the crane,and the backlog had been reduced to a heap of fiery embers,then was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends.The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of those tales of eld since the gleam of red-hot coals died away from the hearthstone.The shutting up of the great fireplaces and the introduction of stoves marks an era;the abdication of shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant Commonplace--sometimes,alas!the opposite of elegant--at the New England fireside.
Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense?It hardly seems as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of English domestic life,reading it,as they must,by a reflected illumination from the past.What would "Cotter's Saturday Night"have been,if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a stove instead of at his "Wee bit ingle blinkin'bonnilie?"New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in many of its ways of doing and thinking,that it almost seems as if that tender poem of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too.
I can see the features of my father,who died when I was a little child,whenever I read the familiar verse:--"The cheerfu'supper done,wi'serious face They round the ingle form a circle wide:
The sire turns o'er,wi'patriarchal grace,The big ha'Bible,ance his father's pride."A grave,thoughtful face his was,lifted up so grandly amid that blooming semicircle of boys and girls,all gathered silently in the glow of the ruddy firelight!The great family Bible had the look upon its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new,and we honored it the more for its apparent age.Its companion was the Westminster Assembly's and Shorter Catechism,out of which my father asked us questions on Sabbath afternoons,when the tea-table had been cleared.He ended the exercise with a prayer,standing up with his face turned toward the wall.My most vivid recollection of his living face is as I saw it reflected in a mirror while he stood thus praying.His closed eyes,the paleness and seriousness of his countenance,awed me.I never forgot that look.I saw it but once again,when,a child of six or seven years,I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin to gaze upon his face for the last time.It wore the same expression that it did in prayer;paler,but no longer care-worn;so peaceful,so noble!They left me standing there a long time,and I could not take my eyes away.I had never thought my father's face a beautiful one until then,but I believe it must have been so,always.
I know that he was a studious man,fond of what was called "solid reading."He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many years the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European ports),in astronomical calculations and historical computations.
A rhyming genius in the town,who undertook to hit off the peculiarities of well-known residents,characterized my father as "Philosophic Ben,Who,pointing to the stars,cries,Land ahead!"His reserved,abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a fund of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him;but my mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his.
