also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out
of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I
was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.

I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the
chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth.
I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen
thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the
quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me
as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father
grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our
shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing
those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say
they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping
on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush.
Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard
a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new
flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more.

Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to
write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her
time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong
natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she
bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor,
and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many
farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able
to enumerate in our mothers.

She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue
eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge