for spades and
bill-hooks, rake-stales, fork-stales, flails. A group of old farm
implements from Memorial Hall, at Deerfield, is here given. The
handleless scythe-snathe is said to have come over on the _Mayflower_.

The making of flails was an important and useful work. Many were broken
and worn out during a great threshing. Both parts, the staff or handle,
and the swingle or swiple, were carefully shaped from well-chosen wood,
to be joined together later by an eelskin or leather strap.

The flail is little seen on farms to-day. Threshing and winnowing
machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared
threshing with a flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on
a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was
certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the "Poor Farm" on Quonsett
Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn of that beautiful and
sparsely occupied country home, two powerful men, picturesque in blue
jeans tucked in heavy boots, in scarlet shirts and great straw hats,
were threshing out grain with flails. Both men were blind, one wholly,
the other partially so--and were "Town Poor." Their strong, bare arms
swung the long flails in alternate strokes with the precision of
clockwork, bringing each blow down on the piled-up wheat-straw which
covered the barn-floor, as they advanced, one stepping backward while
the other stepped forward, and then receded with mechanical and rhythmic
regularity, a step and a blow, from one end of the long barn to the
other. The half-blind thresher could see the outline of the open door
against the sunlight, and his steps and voice guided his sightless
fellow-worker. Thus healthful and useful employment was given to two
stricken waifs through the use of primitive methods, which no modern
machine could ever have afforded; and the blue sky and bay, with
autumnal sunshine on the piled-up golden wheat on floor and in rack,
idealized and even made of the threshers, paupers though they were, a
beautiful picture of old-time farm-life.

Wood for axe-helves was carefully chosen, sawed, split, and whittled
into shape. These were then scraped as smooth as ivory with broken
glass. Some men had a knack that was almost genius in shaping these
axe-helves and selecting the wood for them. In a country where the
broad-axe was so important an implement--used every day by every farmer;
where lumbermen and loggers and shipwrights swung the axe the