barefoot. The furniture of their houses was made with an axe from the
trees of the forest. Their clothing was all made at home. The buckskin
days were over to a great extent, though an occasional hunting-shirt
and pair of moccasins were still seen. But flax and hemp had begun to
be cultivated, and as the wolves were killed off the sheep-folds
increased, and garments resembling those of civilization were spun and
woven, and cut and sewed, by the women of the family. When a man had a
suit of jeans colored with butternut-dye, and his wife a dress of
linsey, they could appear with the best at a wedding or a quilting
frolic. The superfluous could not have been said to exist in a
community where men made their own buttons, where women dug roots in
the woods to make their tea with, where many children never saw a
stick of candy until after they were grown. The only sweetmeats known
were those a skillful cook could compose from the honey plundered from
the hollow oaks where the wild bees had stored it. Yet there was
withal a kind of rude plenty; the woods swarmed with game, and after
swine began to be raised, there was the bacon and hoe-cake which any
south-western farmer will say is good enough for a king. The greatest
privation was the lack of steel implements. His axe was as precious to
the pioneer as his sword to the knight errant. Governor John Reynolds
speaks of the panic felt in his father's family when the axe was
dropped into a stream. A battered piece of tin was carefully saved and
smoothed, and made into a grater for green corn.

[Sidenote: William H. Herndon's speech at Old Settlers' Meeting,
Menard County.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 194.]

They had their own amusements, of course; no form of society is