We raised corn and pumpkins, and hay for the horse and cows.  The corn was gathered into the barn across the road, and a husking-bee gave occasion for mild merrymaking.  As necessity arose the dried ears were shelled and the kernels taken to the mill, where an honest portion was taken for grist.  The corn-meal bin was the source of supply for all demands for breakfast cereal.  Hasty-pudding never palled.  Small incomes sufficed.  Our own bacon, pork, spare-rib, and souse, our own butter, eggs, and vegetables, with occasional poultry, made us little dependent on others.  One of the great-uncles was a sportsman, and snared rabbits and pickerel, thus extending our bill of fare.  Bread and pies came from the weekly baking, to say nothing of beans and codfish.  Berries from the pasture and nuts from the woods were plentiful.  For lights we were dependent on tallow candles or whale-oil, and soap was mostly home-made.

Life was simple but happy.  The small boy had small duties.  He must pick up chips, feed the hens, hunt eggs, sprout potatoes, and weed the garden.  But he had fun the year round, varying with the seasons, but culminating with the winter, when severity was unheeded in the joy of coasting, skating, and sleighing in the daytime, and apples, chestnuts, and pop-corn in the long evenings.

I never tired of watching my grandfather and his brothers as they worked in their shops.  The combs were not the simple instruments we now use to separate and arrange the hair, but ornamental structures that women wore at the back of the head to control their supposedly surplus locks.  They were associated with Spanish beauties, and at their best estate were made of shell, but our combs were of horn and of great variety.  In the better quality, shell was closely imitated, but some were frankly horn and ornamented by the application of aquafortis in patterns artistic or grotesque according to the taste and ability of the operator.  The horns were sawed, split, boiled in oil, pressed flat, and then died out ready to be fashioned into the shape required for the special product.  This was done in a separate little shop by Uncle Silas and Uncle Alvah.  Uncle Emerson then rubbed and polished them in the literally one-horsepower factory, and grandfather bent and packed them for the market.  The power was supplied by a patient horse, “Log Cabin” by name, denoting the date of his acquisition in the Harrison campaign.  All day the faithful nag trod a horizontal wheel in the cellar, which gave way to his efforts and generated the power that was transmitted by belt to the simple machinery above.