open fireplace was the
chimney-corner. Near the door stood an old pine table and some dressers.
They stood against the wall and were filled with crockery. We never
owned a chair. There were several pine stools, a few creepies (small
stools), and a long bench that ran along the bedroom wall, from the
chimney corner to the bedroom door. The mud floor never had the luxury
of a covering, nor did a picture ever adorn the bare walls. When the
floor needed patching, Jamie went to somebody's garden, brought a
shovelful of earth, mixed it and filled the holes. The stools and
creepies were scrubbed once a week, the table once a day. I could draw
an outline of that old table now and accurately mark every dent and
crack in it. I do not know where it came from, but each of us had a
_hope_ that one day we should possess a pig. We built around the hope a
sty and placed it against the end of the cabin. The pig never turned up,
but the hope lived there throughout a generation!

We owned a goat once. In three months it reduced the smooth kindly
feeling in Pogue's entry to the point of total eclipse. We sold it and
spent a year in winning back old friends. We had a garden. It measured
thirty-six by sixteen inches, and was just outside the front window. At
one end was a small currant bush and in the rest of the space Anna grew
an annual crop of nasturtiums.

Once we were prosperous. That was when two older brothers worked with my
father at shoemaking. I remember them, on winter nights, sitting around
the big candlestick--one of the three always singing folk-songs as he
worked. As they worked near the window, Anna sat in her corner and by
the light of a candle in her little sconce made waxed ends for the men.
I browsed among the lasts, clipping, cutting and scratching old leather
parings and dreaming of the wonderful days beyond when I too could make
a boot and sing "Black-eyed Susan."

Then the news came--news of a revolution.

"They're making boots by machinery now," Anna said one day.

"It's dotin' ye are, Anna," Jamie replied. She read the account.

"How cud a machine make a boot, Anna?" he asked in bewilderment.

"I don't know, dear."

Barney McQuillan was the village authority on such things. When he told
Jamie, he looked aghast and said, "How quare!"

Then makers became menders--shoemakers became cobblers. There was
something of magic and romance in the news that a machine could turn out
as much work as twenty-five men, bu