hen we noticed a low wooden cradle, darkened
with age, its sides polished by the hands that had rocked it--that had
come next, no doubt. We remarked that one of the spinning-wheels was
considerably smaller than the others--a child's wheel. We thought it
might have come later, when one of the early occupants of the cradle had
been taught to do her stint. It made a small, plaintive noise when I
turned it, and I could see a little old-fashioned girl in linsey-woolsey
dress and home-made shoes and stockings, in front of the big fireplace
down-stairs, turning and turning to that droning cadence, through long
winter afternoons. Those other wheels had come for other daughters, or
daughters-in-law, and if there ever was a time when all four were going
at once, the low, long room must have been a busy place.

From a nail in a rafter hung a rusty tin lantern, through the patterned
holes of which a single candle had once sprinkled with light the
progress of the farmer's evening chores. That, too, had belonged to the
early time, and from a dim corner I drew another important piece of
furniture of that day. At first this appeared to be a nest of wooden
chopping-bowls, oblong as to shape and evidently fashioned by hand. Then
remembering something that Westbury had told me, I recognized these
bowls as trenchers, the kind used in New England when pioneer homes were
rather short in the matter of tableware. The trencher stood in the
middle of the table and contained the dinner--oftenest a boiled dinner,
I suppose--and members of the family helped themselves from it--I
hesitate to say with their fingers, but evidence as to table cutlery in
the pioneer home of that period is very scanty. And, after all, if they
had no plates, what need of cutlery? Their good, active fingers and
stout teeth were made before knives and forks, and they did not enjoy
their dinner the less for having it in that intimate way. I confess a
sneaking weakness myself for an informal chicken bone or spare-rib--for
most anything of the sort, in fact, that I can get a fairly firm hold
of. It is better, of course, to have a handle to one's gravy, and
sometimes, when the family is looking the other way, I can manage a
swipe with a slice of bread, and so get a brief golden sample of the
joys of my ancestors. The two smaller trenchers must have been used when
company came--one for the bread, possibly; the other for pudding. I hope
it was good, firm pudding, so that it could