on was twenty-five cents. None of the modern agricultural
machinery then existed, not even good modern plows. Crops
were planted by hand and cultivated with the hoe and spade.
Vegetables were dug with the hoe, and hay and grain cut with
the sickle or scythe. There were no ice-houses. The use
of ice for keeping provisions or cooling water was unknown.

My father was well-to-do, and his household lived certainly
as well as any family in the town of Concord, where I was
born. I have no doubt a Roman boy two hundred years before
Christ, or an Athenian boy four hundred years before Christ,
lived quite as well as I did, if not better.

The boy got up in the morning and dressed himself in a room
into which the cold air came through the cracks in the window.
If the temperature were twenty degrees below zero outside,
it was very little higher inside. If he were big enough to
make the fires, he made his way down-stairs in the dark of
a winter morning and found, if the fire had been properly raked
up the night before, a few coals in the ashes in the kitchen
fireplace. The last person who went to bed the night before
had done exactly what Homer describes as the practice in Ulysses's
time, when he tells us that Ulysses covered himself with leaves
after he was washed ashore in Phaiakia:

"He lay down in the midst, heaping the fallen leaves above,
as a man hides a brand in a dark bed of ashes, at some outlying
farm where neighbors are not near, hoarding a seed of fire
to save his seeking elsewhere."

But first he must get a light. Matches are not yet invented.
So he takes from the shelf over the mantelpiece an old tin
or brass candlestick with a piece of tallow candle in it,
and with the tongs takes a coal from the ashes, and holds
the candle wick against the coal and gives a few puffs with
his breath. If he have good luck, he lights the wick, probably
after many failures.

My mother had a very entertaining story connected with the
old-fashioned way of getting a light. Old Jeremiah Mason,
who was probably the greatest lawyer we ever had in New England,
unless we except Daniel Webster, studied law in my uncle's
office and shared a room in his house with another law student.
One April Fool's day the two young gentlemen went out late
in the afternoon, and my aunt, a young unmarried girl who
lived with her sister, and another girl, went into the room
and took the old half-burnt candle out of the candlestick,
cut a piec