so emphatically a wooden age in colonial days that it seemed
almost that there were no hard metals used for any articles which to-day
seem so necessarily of metal. Ploughs were of wood, and harrows;
cart-wheels were often wholly of wood without tires, though sometimes
iron plates called strakes held the felloes together, being fastened to
them by long clinch-pins. The dish-turner and cooper were artisans of
importance in those days; piggins, noggins, runlets, keelers, firkins,
buckets, churns, dye-tubs, cowles, powdering-tubs, were made with chary
or no use of metal.

The forests were the wealth of the colonies in more ways than one; and
it may be said that they furnished both domestic winter employment and
toys for the boys. The New England forests were full of richly varied kinds
of wood, suitable for varied uses, with varied qualities--pliability,
stiffness, durability, weight, strength; and it is surprising to see how
quickly the woods were assigned to fixed uses, even for toys; in every
state pop-guns were made from elder; bows and arrows of hemlock; whistles
of chestnut or willow.

The Rev. John Pierpont wrote thus of the whittling of his childhood
days:--

"The Yankee boy before he's sent to school
Well knows the mysteries of that magic tool--
The pocket-knife. To that his wistful eye
Turns, while he hears his mother's lullaby.
And in the education of the lad,
No little part that implement hath had.
His pocket-knife to the young whittler brings
A growing knowledge of material things,
Projectiles, music, and the sculptor's art.
His chestnut whistle, and his shingle dart,
His elder pop-gun with its hickory rod,
Its sharp explosion and rebounding wad,
His corn-stalk fiddle, and the deeper tone
That murmurs from his pumpkin-leaf trombone
Conspire to teach the boy. To these succeed
His bow, his arrow of a feathered reed,
His windmill raised the passing breeze to win,
His water-wheel that turns upon a pin.
Thus by his genius and his jack-knife driven
Ere long he'll solve you any problem given;
Make you a locomotive or a clock,
Cut a canal or build a floating dock:
Make anything in short for sea or shore,
From a child's rattle to a seventy-four.
Make it, said I--ay, when he undertakes it,
He'll make the thing and make the thing that makes it."

The boy's jack-knife was a possession so highly desired, so cl