lied by
heavy woollen stockings, shoes, and an over-covering of old stockings,
or cloth soaked in neat's-foot oil; this was deemed a positive
preventive of frozen feet.

It was the custom both among men and women to join forces on a smaller
scale and have a little neighborly visiting by what was called
"change-work." For instance, if two neighbors both were to make soap, or
both to make apple-butter, or both to make up a rag carpet, instead of
each woman sitting at home alone sewing and fitting the carpet, one
would take her thimble and go to spend the day, and the two would sew
all day long, finish and lay the carpet at one house. In a few days the
visit would be returned, and the second carpet be finished. Sometimes
the work was easier when two worked together. One man could load logs
and sled them down to the sawmill alone, but two by "change-work" could
accomplish the task much more rapidly and with less strain.

Even those evil days of New England households, the annual
house-cleaning, were robbed of some of their dismal terrors by what was
known as a "whang," a gathering of a few friendly women neighbors to
assist one another in that dire time, and thus speed and shorten the
hours of misery.

For any details of domestic life of colonial days the reader has ever to
turn to the diary of Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston, just as the student
of English life of the same date turns to the diary of Samuel Pepys.
Sewall was a Puritan of the narrow type of the later days of Puritanism;
and there is little of warmth or beauty in his pages, save that
throughout them there shines with gentle radiance the unconscious record
of a pure and never-dying neighborliness, the neighborliness of an
upright and reserved but deeply tender Christian. No thoughtful person
can read the simple and meagre, but wholly self-forgetful entries which
reveal this trait of character without a feeling of profound respect and
even affection for Sewall. He was the richest man in town, and one of
the most dignified of citizens, a busy man full of many cares and plans.
But he watched by the bedside of his sick and dying neighbors, those of
humble station as well as his friends and kinsfolk, nursing them with
tender care, praying with them, bringing appetizing gifts, and also
giving pecuniary aid to the household. He afforded even more homely
examples of neighborly feeling; he sent "tastes of his dinner" many
times to friends and neighbors. This pleasant