EARLY DAY STORIES. v37 



into tow cloth for summer pants for the boys ; and there was 

 the big wheel for spinning woolen yarn for socks, stockings 

 and mittens, and for cloth for winter wear both for the boys 

 and for the girls ; and there was the quill wheel, the reel 

 and the swifts and the warping bars and the cards and the 

 loom with its reeds, its shuttles and its bobbins; and out in 

 the woodshed, probably, would be found the break, the 

 swingle, and the hatchels of different sizes for separating 

 the flax fibre from the woody part. Every family manufac- 

 tured at least a part of the cloth for clothing both for the 

 old and young members of the family and all the woolen 

 yarn for stockings and mittens. There was not a loom in 

 every family, but there were generally two or three in ev- 

 ery neighborhood. Some of the wool raised was sold on the 

 market, but much of it was worked up at home. There were 

 carding machines and fulling mills run by water power in 

 many places, where the wool was cleansed and carded into 

 rolls and sent back to the owner to be spun and woven and 

 afterward returned to the niill to be colored, fulled, dressed, 

 pressed and finished off, ready to be cut and made into gar- 

 ments. 



The tools on the farm were a cast iron plow with wood 

 handles and beam, a harrow shaped like a letter V with a 

 cross bar connecting the sides to keep it from spreading, a 

 cradle for cutting grain, scythes, axes, spades, mattocks, 

 hand rakes and pitchforks with two tines only. All the ha^ 

 and grain was cut and handled by hand, and most of it was 

 put into barns instead of being stacked in the field. As far 

 back as my memory goes all the corn was hoed by hand, 

 but after a few years a double shovel plow was invented, to 

 be worked with one horse, men with hoes following it. The 

 first threshing machine I ever saw was when I was about 

 twelve years old. It was a wonder to us then, and it would 

 be a wonder now. There was no separator — the grain, chaff 

 and straw all coming out at one place, it keeping one man 



