"Polly Greene, Her Reel.
Count your threads right
If you reel in the night
When I am far away.
June, 1777."
Perhaps some Revolutionary soldier gave this as a parting gift to his sweetheart on the eve of battle.
On his powder-horn the rustic carver bestowed his best and daintiest work. Emblem both of war and of sport, it seemed worthy of being shaped into the highest expression of his artistic longing. A chapter, even a book, might be filled with the romantic history and representations of American powder-horns; patriotism, sentiment, and adventure shed equal halos over them. Months of the patient work of every spare moment was spent in beautifying them, and their quaintness, variety, and individuality are a never-ceasing delight to the antiquary. Maps, plans, legends, verses, portraits, landscapes, family history, crests, dates of births, marriages, and deaths, lists of battles, patriotic and religious sentiments, all may be found on powder-horns. They have in many cases proved valuable historical records, and have sometimes been the only records of events. Mr. Rufus A. Grider, of Canajoharie, has made colored drawings of about five hundred of these powder-horns, and of canteens or drinking-horns. It is unfortunate that the ordinary processes of book-illustration give too scant suggestion of the variety, beauty, and delicacy of their decoration, to permit the reproduction of some of these powder-horns in these pages.
These habits of employing the spare moments of farm-life in the manufacture from wood of farm implements and various aids to domestic comfort, were not peculiar to New England farmers, nor invented by them. The old English farmer-author, Thomas Tusser, in his rhymed book, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, written in the sixteenth century (which Southey declared to be one of the most curious and formerly one of the most popular books in our language), was careful to give instructions in his "remembrances" and "doings" as to similar industries on the English farm and manor house. He says:—
"Yokes, forks, and such other let bailie spy out
And gather the same as he walketh about;
And after, at leisure, let this be his hire,
To beath them and trim them at home by the fire."
To beath is to heat unseasoned wood to harden and straighten it.
"If hop-yard or orchard ye mean for to have,
For hop-poles and crotches in lopping go save.
"Save elm, ash, and crab tree for cart and for plow,
Save step for a stile of the crotch of a bough;
Save hazel for forks, save sallow for rake:
Save hulver and thorn, thereof flail for to make."
The Massachusetts Bay settlers came chiefly from the vicinity, many from the same county, where Tusser lived and farmed, and where his points of good husbandry were household words; so they had in their English homes as had their grandfathers before them, the knowledge and habit of saving and utilizing the various woods on the farm, and of occupying every spare minute with the useful jack-knife. The varied and bountiful trees of the New World stimulated and emphasized the whittling habit until it became universally accepted as a distinguishing New England characteristic, a Yankee trait.