A New England Girlhood | Page 7

attitude towards her: and she was so profoundly impressed by it all at the time, that when they had left the house, and were on their homeward path through the woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a?whisper, "Mother, was that God?"
I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not having been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place, as my father and uncles and aunts and some of my cousins had been. But perhaps I had more of the romantic and legendary charm of it than if I had been brought up there, for my father, in his?communicative moods, never wearied of telling us about his?childhood; and we felt that we still held a birthright claim upon that picturesque spot through him. Besides, it was only three or four miles away, and before the day of railroads, that was?thought nothing of as a walk, by young or old.
But, in fact, I first saw the light in the very middle of?Beverly, in full view of the town clock and the Old South?steeple. (I believe there is an "Old South" in nearly all these first-settled cities and villages of Eastern Massachusetts. The town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity then, with its oldfashioned people and weather-worn houses; 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 threelegged 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 backlog had been reduced to a heap of fiery embers, then was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends. The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of those tales of eld since the gleam of red-hot coals died away from the hearthstone. The shutting up of the great fireplaces and the introduction of stoves marks an era; the abdication of shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant Commonplace-- sometimes, alas! the opposite of elegant--at the New England fireside.
Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense? It hardly seems as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a reflected illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's?Saturday Night" have been, if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a stove instead of at his
"Wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnilie?"
New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in