-stairs. If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance,
found himself in the living-rooms, or the parlor, he was very unhappy,
and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were not of an oppressive
grandeur, and one was much like another. The parlor had what was called
a flowered-carpet or gay pattern of ingrain on its floor, and the other
rooms had rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for the work,
and dyed at home with such native tints as butternut and foreign colors
as logwood. The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood was
burned, and coal was never seen. They were lit at night with
tallow-candles, which were mostly made by the housewife herself, or by
lard-oil glass lamps. In the winter the oil would get so stiff with the
cold that it had to be thawed out at the fire before the lamp would
burn. There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; and the fire
on the hearth was kept over from day to day all winter long, by covering
a log at night with ashes; in the morning it would be a bed of coals.
There were no fires in bedrooms, or at least not in a boy's bedroom, and
sometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher before he could wash;
it did not take him very long to dress.

I have said that they burned wood for heating in the Boy's Town; but my
boy could remember one winter when they burned ears of corn in the
printing-office stove because it was cheaper. I believe they still
sometimes burn corn in the West, when they are too far from a market to
sell it at a paying price; but it always seems a sin and a shame that in
a state pretending to be civilized food should ever be destroyed when
so many are hungry. When one hears of such things one would almost think
that boys could make a better state than this of the men.

XX.

TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.

IN the Boy's Town a great many men gave nearly their whole time to the
affairs of the state, and did hardly anything but talk politics all day;
they even sat up late at night to do it. Among these politicians the
Whigs were sacred in my boy's eyes, but the Democrats appeared like
enemies of the human race; and one of the strangest things that ever
happened to him was to find his father associating with men who came out
of the Democratic party at the time he left the Whig party, and joining
with them in a common cause against both. But when he understood what a
good cause it was, and came to sing songs against slavery, he was
reconciled,