oven filled with brown
bread, pies, pots of beans, etc. Sometimes the bread was baked in pans,
sometimes it was baked in a great mass set on cabbage leaves or oak
leaves. In some towns an autumn harvest of oak leaves was gathered by
children to use throughout the winter. The leaves were strung on sticks.
This gathering was called going a-leafing.

By the oven side was always a long-handled shovel known as a peel or
slice, which sometimes had a rack or rest to hold it; this implement was
a necessity in order to place the food well within the glowing oven. The
peel was sprinkled with meal, great heaps of dough were placed thereon,
and by a dexterous twist they were thrown on the cabbage or oak leaves.
A bread peel was a universal gift to a bride; it was significant of
domestic utility and plenty, and was held to be luck-bearing. On
Thanksgiving week the great oven had a fire built in it every morning,
and every night it was well filled and closed till morning.

On one side of the kitchen often stood a dresser, on which was placed in
orderly rows the cheerful pewter and scant earthenware of the
household:--

"----the room was bright
With glimpses of reflected light,
From plates that on the dresser shone."

In Dutch households plate-racks, spoon-racks, knife-racks,--all hanging
on the wall,--took the place of the New England dresser.

In the old Phillips farmhouse at Wickford, Rhode Island, is a splendid
chimney over twenty feet square. So much room does it occupy that there
is no central staircase, but little winding stairs ascend at three
corners of the house. In the vast fireplace an ox could literally have
been roasted. On each chimney-piece are hooks to hang firearms, and at
one side curious little drawers are set for pipes and tobacco. In some
Dutch houses in New York these tobacco shelves are in the entry, over
the front door, and a narrow flight of three or four steps leads up to
them. Hanging on a nail alongside the tobacco drawer, or shelf, would
usually be seen a pipe-tongs, or smoking-tongs. They were slender
little tongs, usually of iron or steel; with them the smoker lifted a
coal from the fireplace to light his pipe. The tongs owned and used by
Captain Joshua Wingate, of Hampton, New Hampshire, who lived from 1679
to 1769, are here shown. The handle is unlike any other I have seen,
having one end elongated, knobbed, and ingeniously bent S-shaped into
convenient form to press down the toba