double-hived: It is customary to cover beehives with newspapers, then slip an outside box down over papers and all to keep the swarm from the cutting cold winds of winter. Bees are frequently brought into the cellar for the winter in northern latitudes.
put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their ears: What does the writer mean?
changed their roost from the ridge-pole: Turkeys roost high; but the ridge-pole of the crib-house used to be too cold in the dead of winter, so they would change to the more protected apple-tree, still roosting high, however.
pearmain: name of a “summer” apple in New Jersey; of a winter apple in this section of Massachusetts.
garden of box: the box bush.
bleeding-hearts: an old-fashioned flower; a low shrub with pendent blossoms shaped like a heart.
creeper: the Virginia creeper, or woodbine.
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“template” stove: from template or templet, a strip of sheet iron used in boiler-making. A simple long stove made of a single piece of sheet iron, bent like an inverted U, and riveted to a cast iron bottom. It had a single door in the front; and burnt pieces of wood about two feet long. Often called “tenplate” stove.
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seven of us alone: seven brothers and sisters in the writer’s family.
flats: Describe the outside appearance of a city “flat,” and also the inside if you have ever been in a flat. Is it like a farmhouse?
kitchenette: What kind of a kitchen is a kitchenette?
neither a farm nor a city home: By which the writer means a farm in the ordinary sense of land cultivated for a living. His is a home only, with several acres around it, largely in woods and grass.
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“Bucksy”: the invented name of a little Indian hero about whom the writer tells stories to his little boys.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
Suggestions as to the practical uses to which this chapter can be put may be gathered from the notes to chapter IV and chapter XII, each of which is similar to this one.