entire day
for many months, men were ready to pay double price for a well-made
helve, so shaped as to let the heavy blow jar as little as possible the
hand holding the helve. One Maine farmer boasted that he had made and
sold five hundred axe-helves, and received a good price for them all;
that some had gone five hundred miles out west, others a hundred miles
"up country"; and of no one of them which he had set had it ever been
said, as of the axe in Deuteronomy, "When a man goeth into the wood to
hew wood, and his hand fetcheth a stroke with the axe to cut down a
tree, then the head slippeth from the helve."

A little money might be earned by cutting heel-pegs for shoemakers.
These were made of a maple trunk sawed across the grain, making the
circular board thin enough--a half inch or so--for the correct length of
the pegs. The end was then marked in parallel lines, then grooved across
at right angles, then split as marked into pegs with knife and mallet. A
story is told of a farmer named Meigs, who, on the winter ride to
market in company with a score or more of his neighbors, stole out at
night from the tavern fireside where all were gathered to the barn where
the horses were put up. There he took an oat-bag out of a neighbor's
sleigh and poured out a good feed for his own horse. In the morning it
was found that his horse had not relished the shoe-pegs that had been
put in his manger; and their telltale presence plainly pointed out the
thief. These shoe-pegs were a venture of two farmer boys which their
father was taking to town to sell for them, and in indignation the boys
thrust on the thief the name of Shoe-pegs Meigs, which he carried to the
end of his life.

When the boys had learned to use a few other tools besides their
jack-knives, as they quickly did, they could get sawed staves from the
sawmills and make up shooks of staves bound with hoops of red oak, for
molasses hogsheads. These would be shipped to the West Indies, and form
an important link in the profitable rum and slave round of traffic that
bound Africa, New England, and the West Indies so closely together in
those days. A constant occupation for men and boys was making rived or
shaved shingles. They were split with a beetle and wedge. A smart
workman could by sharp work make a thousand a day. There may still be
occasionally found in what were well-wooded pine regions, in shed or
barn-lofts, or in old wood-houses, a stout oaken frame or rack such as