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 snow-
flake 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