eir very
dress represented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and
daughters had dressed for work; facing all weather, cold and hot, wet
and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided hills, digging out
the rocks by hard lifting and a good many very practical experiments in
mechanics, dressing the flax, threshing the rye, dragging home, in the
deep snows, the great woodpile of the year's consumption; and then when
the day is ended--having no loose money to spend in taverns--taking
their recreation all together in reading or singing or happy talk or
silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep--to rise again with the
sun and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the
last. And so they lived, working out, each year, a little advance of
thrift, just within the line of comfort.

No mode of life was ever more expensive: it was life at the expense of
labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper
enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more expensive than we shall ever
see again. Still it was a life of honesty and simple content and sturdy
victory. Immoralities that rot down the vigor and humble the
consciousness of families were as much less frequent as they had less
thought of adventure; less to do with travel and trade and money, and
were closer to nature and the simple life of home.

It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it
imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt--a closely girded
habit of economy. Harnessed all together into the producing process,
young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse to
the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of
squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and
grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost,
even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in
the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or
expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with
meanness--simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is
not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any
conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get
their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it
was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be
found, is really anything but meanness.

THE FOU