II
There is work about making apple-butter
Perhaps I am making it all sound too easy and comfortable. The past has a way of submerging its sorrows. With a little effort, however, I can still recall some of them. Our transition period was not all picnic and poetry. There were days of stress—hard, nerve-racking days when it seemed that never in the wide world would things get into shape—as when, for instance, the new kitchen range arrived and would not go through any of the kitchen doors; when our grandfather clock had been found an inch too tall for any of our rooms; when our big fireplace had poured out smoke until we were blind and asphyxiated. Any one of these things would be irritating, and coming together, as they did, one gloomy, chilly morning, they had presented an aspect almost of failure. Then, being resolute and in good health, we proceeded to correct matters. We stripped the range for action, took out a sash, and brought it in edgewise through a window. We mortised down an inch into the flinty oak floor and let in the legs of the old clock so that its top ornament would just clear the ceiling.
The fireplace problem was more serious. We knew that the chimney was big enough, for we could look up it at a three-foot square of sky, and our earlier fires had given us no trouble. We solved the mystery when we threw open an outside door to let out the smoke. The smoke did not go out; it rushed back to the big fireplace and went up the chimney, where it belonged. We understood, then—in the old days air had poured in through a hundred cracks and crevices. Now we had tightened our walls and windows until the big chimney could no longer get its breath. It must have a vent, an air-supply which must come from the outside, yet not through the room.
Here was a chance for invention. I went down cellar to reflect and investigate. I decided that a stove-pipe could be carried from a small cellar window to the old chimney base, and by prying up the thick stone hearth we could excavate beneath it a passage which would admit the pipe to one end of the fireplace, where it could be covered and made sightly by a register. Old Pop came with his crowbar and pick, and Westbury brought the galvanized pipe and the grating. It was quite a strenuous job while it lasted, but it was the salvation of our big fireplace, and I was so proud of the result that I did not greatly mind the mashed foot I got through Old Pop's allowing the thousand-pound stone hearth to rest on it while he attended to another matter.
I have given the details of this non-smoke device because any one buying and repairing an old house is likely to be smoked out and might not immediately stumble upon the simple remedy. I know when later, at the club, I explained it to an architectural friend, he confessed that the notion had not occurred to him, adding, with some shame, that he had more than once left a considerable crack under a door as an air-supply. Imagine!
So these troubles passed, and others in kind and variety. Those were busy days. We were doing so many things, we hardly had time to enjoy the fall scenery, the second stage of it, as it were, when the goldenrod and queen's-lace-handkerchief were gone, the blue wild asters fading, and leaves beginning to fall, though the hilltops were still ablaze with crimson and gold. Once we stole an afternoon and climbed a ridge that looked across a valley to other ridges swept by the flame of autumn. It was really our first wide vision of the gorgeous fall colorings of New England, and they are not surpassed, I think, anywhere this side of heaven.
We gathered our apples. We had a small orchard of red Baldwins across the brook, and some old, scattering trees such as you will find on every New England farm. These last were very ancient, and of varieties unknown to-day. One, badly broken by the wind, we cut, and its rings gave it one hundred and fifty years. Putnam's soldiers could have hooked apples from that tree, and probably did so, for it was not in plain view of the house.
We put the Baldwins away and made cider of the others, it being now the right moment, when there was a tang of frost in the morning air. We picked up enough to fill both of Uncle Joe's cider-barrels, Westbury and I hauled them to the mill, and the next day Elizabeth was boiling down the sweet juice into apple-butter, which is one of the best things in the world.
There is work about making apple-butter. It is not just a simple matter of putting on some juice and letting it boil. Apples must go into it, too, a great many of them, and those apples must be peeled and sliced, and stirred and stirred eternally. And then you will find that you need more apples, more peeling and slicing, and more stirring and stirring, oh yes, indeed. Elizabeth stirred, I stirred, and Lazarus, our small colored vassal, stirred. I said if I had time I would invent an apple-butter machine, and Elizabeth declared she would never undertake such a job again, never in the world! But that was mere momentary rebellion. When it was all spiced and done and some of it spread on slices of fresh bread and butter, discontent and weariness passed, and next day she and Lazarus were making pickles and catsup and apple jelly, while Old Pop and I were hauling all the flat stones we could find and paving the wide space between the house and the stone curb which already we had built around the well. Oh, there is plenty to do when one has bought an old farm and wants to have all the good things, and the livable things; and October is the time to do them, when the mornings are brisk, and the days are balmy, and evening brings solace by the open fire.