for I was
born while my mother-century was still in her youth, just rounding the
first quarter of her hundred years.

Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during my
childhood; they were kept up in these old towns longer than elsewhere.
We used tallow candles and oil lamps, and sat by open fireplaces. There
was always a tinder-box in some safe corner or other, and fire was
kindled by striking flint and steel upon the tinder. What magic it
seemed to me, when I was first allowed to strike that wonderful spark,
and light the kitchen fire!

The fireplace was deep, and there was a "settle" in the chimney corner,
where three of us youngest girls could sit together and toast our toes
on the andirons (two Continental soldiers in full uniform, marching one
after the other), while we looked up the chimney into a square of blue
sky, and sometimes caught a snowflake on our foreheads; or sometimes
smirched our clean aprons (high-necked and long sleeved ones, known as
"tiers"), against the swinging crane with its sooty pot-hooks and
trammels.

The coffee-pot was set for breakfast over hot coals, on a three-legged
bit of iron called a "trivet." Potatoes were roasted in the ashes, and
the Thanksgiving turkey in a "tin-kitchen," the business of turning the
spit being usually delegate to some of us, small folk, who were only
too willing to burn our faces in honor of the annual festival.

There were brick ovens in the chimney corner, where the great bakings
were done; but there was also an iron article called a "Dutch oven," in
which delicious bread could be baked over the coals at short notice.
And there was never was anything that tasted better than my mother's
"firecake,"--a short-cake spread on a smooth piece of board, and set up
with a flat-iron before the blaze, browned on one side, and then turned
over to be browned on the other. (It required some sleight of hand to
do that.) If I could only be allowed to blow the bellows--the very old
people called them "belluses"--when the fire began to get low, I was a
happy girl.

Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy affairs,
and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that
which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm,
beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset. There
is no such home-splendor now.

When supper was finished, and the tea-kettle was pushed back on the
crane, and the bac