ouse. It was too exact and too dainty a
piece of work to be intrusted to clumsy or wasteful servants. Various
simply shaped sugar-shears or sugar-cutters were used. An ordinary form
is shown in the illustration. I well recall the only family in which I
ever saw this solemn function of sugar-cutting take place--it was about
thirty years ago. An old Boston East India merchant, one of the last to
cling to a residence in what is known now as the "Burnt District,"
always desired (and his desire was law) to use these loaves of sugar in
his household. I don't know where he got them so long after every one
else had apparently ceased buying them--he may have specially imported
them; at any rate he had them, and to the end of her life it was the
morning duty of his wife "to cut the sugar." I can see my old cousin
still in what she termed her breakfast room, dressed very handsomely,
standing before a bare mahogany table on which a maid placed the
considerable array of a silver salver without legs, which was set on a
folded cloth and held the sugar-loaf and the sugar-cutter; and another
salver with legs that bore various bowls and one beautiful silver
sugar-box which was kept filled high for her husband's toddy. It seemed
an interminably tedious work to me and a senseless one, as I chafingly
waited for the delightful morning drive in delightful Boston. It was in
this household that I encountered the sweetest thing of my whole life; I
have written elsewhere its praises in full; a barrel, a small one, to be
sure, but still a whole teak-wood barrel full of long strings of
glistening rock-candy. I had my fill of it at will, though it was not
kept as a sweetmeat, but was a kitchen store having a special use in
the manufacture of rich brandy sauces for plum puddings, and of a kind
of marchepane ornamentation for desserts.

All the spices used in the household were also ground at home, in
spice-mortars and spice-mills. These were of various sizes, including
the pepper-mills, which were set on the table at meal-times, and the
tiny ornamental graters which were carried in the pocket.

The entire food of a household was the possible production of a farm. In
a paper published in the American Museum in 1787 an old farmer says:--

"At this time my farm gave me and my whole family a good living on
the produce of it, and left me one year with another one hundred
and fifty silver dollars, for I never spent more than ten dollars a