“I remember that they had various ways of employing the young people who called upon them.  If it was late in the autumn, there was a chopping-board and chopping-knife ready, with the feet of neat-cattle, from which the oily parts had been extracted by boiling.  ‘You do not want to be idle,’ they would say, ’chop this meat, and you shall have your share of the mince-pies that we are going to make.’  At other times a supply of old woollen stockings were ready for unraveling.  ’We know you do not care to be idle’ they would say, ’here are some stockings which you would oblige us by unraveling.’  If you asked what use they made of the spools of woollen thread obtained by this process, they would answer:  ’We use it as the weft of the linsey-woolsey with which we clothe our negroes.’  They had negro slaves in those times, and old Tone, a faithful black servant of theirs, who has seen more than a hundred years, is alive yet.

“They practiced one very peculiar piece of economy.  The white hickory you know, yields the purest and sweetest of saccharine juices.  They had their hickory fuel cut into short billets, which before placing on the fire they laid on the andirons, a little in front of the blaze, so as to subject it to a pretty strong heat.  This caused the syrup in the wood to drop from each end of the billet, where it was caught in a cup, and in this way a gallon or two was collected in the course of a fortnight.  With this they flavored their finest cakes.

“They died about thirty years since, one at the age of eighty-nine, and the other at the age of ninety.  On the tomb-stone of one of them, it was recorded that she had been a member of the church for seventy years.  Their father was a remarkable man in his way.  He was a rich man in his time, and kept a park of deer, one of the last known in Connecticut, for the purpose of supplying his table with venison.  He prided himself on the strict and literal fulfillment of his word.  On one occasion he had a law-suit with one of his neighbors, before a justice of the peace, in which he was cast and ordered to pay ten shillings damages, and a shilling as the fees of court.  He paid the ten shillings, and asked the justice whether he would allow him to pay the remaining shilling when he next passed his door.  The magistrate readily consented, but from that time old Comstock never went by his house.  Whenever he had occasion to go to church, or to any other place, the direct road to which led by the justice’s door, he was careful to take a lane which passed behind the dwelling, and at some distance from it.  The shilling remained unpaid up to the day of his death, and it was found that in his last will he had directed that his corpse should be carried by that lane to the place of interment.”