Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

It was not altogether pleasant to Mrs. Cushing to receive a message from Mis' Persis that she would come and make up her candles for her on the 25th of December. In a figurative and symbolical point of view, the devoting that day to the creation of the year's stock of light might have seemed eminently appropriate. But the making of so many candles involved an amount of disagreeable particulars hard to conceive in our days, when gas and kerosene make the lighting of houses one of the least of cares.

In the times we speak of, candle-making for a large household was a serious undertaking, and the day devoted to it was one that any child would remember as an unlucky one for childish purposes of enjoyment, seven-fold worse in its way even than washing-day. Mrs. Cushing still retained enough of the habits of her early education to have preferred a quiet day for her Christmas. She would willingly have spent it in letter-writing, reading and meditation, but when Mis' Persis gave her time and labor it seemed only fair to allow her to choose her own day.

So, upon this Christmas morning, Mis' Persis appeared on the ground by day-dawn. A great kettle was slung over the kitchen fire, in which cakes of tallow were speedily liquefying; a frame was placed quite across the kitchen to sustain candle-rods, with a train of boards underneath to catch the drippings, and Mis' Persis, with a brow like one of the Fates, announced: "Now we can't hev any young 'uns in this kitchen to-day;" and Dolly saw that there was no getting any attention in that quarter.

Mis' Persis, in a gracious Saturday afternoon mood, sitting in her own tent-door dispensing hospitalities and cookies, was one thing; but Mis' Persis in her armor, with her loins girded and a hard day's work to be conquered, was quite another: she was terrible as Minerva with her helmet on.

Dinner-baskets for all the children were hastily packed, and they were sent off to school with the injunction on no account to show their faces about the premises till night. The Doctor, warned of what was going on, retreated to his study at the top of the house, where, serenely above the lower cares of earth, he sailed off into President Edwards's treatise on the nature of true virtue, concerning which he was preparing a paper to read at the next Association meeting.

That candles were a necessity of life he was well convinced, and by faith he dimly accepted the fact that one day in the year the whole house was to be devoted and given up to this manufacture; and his part of the business, as he understood it, was, clearly, to keep himself out of the way till it was over.

"There won't be much of a dinner at home, anyway," said Nabby to Dolly, as she packed her basket with an extra doughnut or two. "I've got to go to church to-day, 'cause I'm one of the singers, and your ma'll be busy waitin' on her; so we shall just have a pick-up dinner, and you be sure not to come home till night; by that time it'll be all over."

Dolly trotted off to school well content with the prospect before her: a nooning, with leave to play with the girls at school, was not an unpleasant idea.

But the first thing that saluted her on her arrival was that Bessie Lewis—her own dear, particular Bessie—was going to have a Christmas party at her house that afternoon, and was around distributing invitations right and left among the scholars with a generous freedom.