The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

The scuttle hole in the roof was then open, to give light to the cleaners, and a far, bright square of light shone down. It was as if the garret smiled.

All the queer old things, stowed away under the eaves, behind boxes and broken furniture and stoves and rolls of carpets, were dragged forth; and they were as good as new discoveries to the children who had not seen them nor heard their stories since last house-cleaning time.

There was the brass warming-pan, with its shining lid full of holes like a pepper-box. On this warming-pan, as a sort of sled, the children used to ride by turns—one child seated on, or in, the pan, two others dragging it over the floor by the long, dark wood handle.

And there were the pattens “which step-great-grandmother Sheppard brought over from England;” one pair with leather straps and one with straps of cotton velvet, edged with a tarnished gilt embroidery. The straps were meant to lace over a full-grown woman’s instep, but the children managed somehow to keep them on their feet, and they clattered about, on steel-shod soles, with a racket equal to the midnight clatter of Santa Claus’s team of reindeer.

There was a huge muff of dark fur, kept in a tall blue paper bandbox; the children could bury their arms in it up to the shoulder. It had been carried by some lady in the time of short waists and scant skirts and high coat collars; when girls covered their bare arms with long kid gloves and tucked their little slippered toes into fur-lined foot-muffs and went on moonlight sleighing parties, dressed as girls dress nowadays for a dance.

One of these very same foot-muffs (the moths had once got into it) led a sort of at-arm’s-length existence in the garret, neither quite condemned nor yet allowed to mingle with unimpeachable articles of clothing. And there was a “foot-stove” used in old times on long drives in winter or in the cold country meeting-houses. They were indefatigable visitors and meeting-goers,—those old-time Friends. Weather and distance were nothing thought of; and in the most troublous times they could go to and fro in their peaceful character, unmolested and unsuspected, though no doubt they had their sympathies as strong as other people’s.

A china bowl is still shown, in one branch of grandfather’s family, which one of the great-aunts, then a young woman, carried on her saddle-bow through both the British and Continental lines, from her old home on Long Island to her husband’s house on the west bank of the Hudson above West Point.

No traveling member of the society ever thought of “putting-up” for the night anywhere but at a Friend’s house. Journeys were planned in stages from such a Friend’s house to such another one’s, or from meeting to meeting. In days when letter postage was dear and newspapers were almost unknown, such visits were keenly welcome, and were a chief means by which isolated country families kept up their communication with the world.

There were many old-fashioned household utensils in the garret, the use of which had to be explained to the children; and all this was as good as history, and more easily remembered than much that is written in books.

There was the old “Dutch oven” that had stood in front of roaring hearth-fires in days when Christmas dinners were cooked without the aid of stoves or ranges. And there were the iron firedogs, the pot-hooks and the crane which were part of the fireplace furniture. And the big wool-wheel for the spinning of yarn, the smaller and lady-like flax-wheel, and the tin candle moulds for the making of tallow candles; and a pleasure it must have been to see the candles “drawn,” when the pure white tallow had set in the slender tubes and taken the shape of them perfectly,—each candle, when drawn out by the wick, as cold and hard and smooth as alabaster. And there was the “baby-jumper” and the wicker “runaround,” to show that babies had always been babies—just the same restless little pets then as now—and that mother’s and nurse’s arms were as apt to get tired.