wshoe's the best help a man can have in the winter. It's the
easiest to get stuff for, the easiest to walk on, the easiest to
carry. And just so a birch broom is the best broom a man or at any
rate a woman can have; four best things and all of 'em is Injun.
Now you just slip in and take that broom to Phillis. I see her the
last time I was here a-using a mizrable store broom to clean her
oven--and just ask her if I can't have a mug of apple-jack afore I
go to bed."

If this scene had been laid in New Hampshire or Vermont instead of
Narragansett, the Indian broom would have been no novelty to any boy or
house-servant. For in the northern New England states, heavily wooded
with yellow birch, every boy knew how to make the Indian brooms, and
every household in country or town had them. There was a constant demand
in Boston for them, and sometimes country stores had several hundred of
the brooms at a time. Throughout Vermont seventy years ago the uniform
price paid for making one of these brooms was six cents; and if the
splints were very fine and the handle scraped with glass, it took
nearly three evenings to finish it. Indian squaws peddled them
throughout the country for ninepence apiece. Major Robert Randolph told
in fashionable London circles about the year 1750, that when he was a
boy in New Hampshire he earned his only spending-money by making these
brooms and carrying them on his back ten miles to town to sell them.
Girls could whittle as well as boys, and often exchanged the birch
brooms they made for a bit of ribbon or lace.

A simpler and less durable broom was made of hemlock branches. A local
rhyme says of them:--

"Driving at twilight the waiting cows,
With arms full-laden with hemlock boughs,
To be traced on a broom ere the coming day
From its eastern chambers should dance away."

The hemlock broom was simply a bunch of close-growing, full-foliaged
hemlock branches tied tightly together and wound around with hempen
twine, "traced," the rhyme says, with a sharply pointed handle, which
the boys had shaped and whittled, driven well into the bound portion.
This making of brooms for domestic use is but an example of one of the
many score of useful domestic and farm articles which were furnished by
the natural resources of every wood-lot, adapted by the Yankee
jack-knife and a few equally simple tools, of which the gimlet might
take the second place.

It was