[The Iron Stove]
“Did you see him to-day?” asked a little girl in gray, all excitement, as she opened the door to admit her brother.
The boy, shaking with the cold—for it was winter and his jacket was none too thick—set down his basket on the rough deal table, and leaned over the tiny fire that burned on the hearth. His eyes shone, though, as he turned to answer his sister.
“Yes, Beth, I saw him down at the wharf and he gave me this.” As he spoke, William drew from underneath his coat, where he had tucked it to surprise Beth, a crude little brush made of rushes bound together with narrow strips of willow.
“What is it?” Beth took the brush in her hands and held it up to the light, looking at it curiously. She made a quaint picture in the shifting light of the fire, a little Quaker girl of old Philadelphia, her yellow curls tucked inside a close-fitting gray cap, and her straight gray frock reaching almost to the heels of her heavy shoes.
“It is something new for cleaning,” William explained. He took the brush and began sweeping up the ashes on the hearth, as Beth watched him curiously. “Mr. Franklin brought a whole bunch of them down to the wharf to show to people, and he gave me one.”
“How did he make it?” Beth asked curiously.
“It took him a whole year, for it had to grow first,” William explained. “He saw some brush baskets last year that the sea captains had brought fruit in, lying in the wet on the wharf. They had sprouted and sent out shoots, so what did Mr. Franklin do but plant the shoots in his garden. They grew and this year he had a fine crop of broom corn, as he called it. He dried it, and bound it into these brushes. He has some with long handles, and he calls them brooms.”
The children’s mother had come in now from the next room and she grasped the hearth brush with eagerness.
“It is just what Philadelphia, the city of cleanliness, needs,” she said, as she went to work brushing the corners of the window sills and the mantle piece. “If we were to take more thought of our houses and less of these street brawls as to who is for, and who is against the king, it would be better.”