CHAPTER XX.
OLD-TIME CUSTOMS AND INDUSTRIES.
Peace was indeed welcome to a people so long deprived of an accessible market as had been the inhabitants of Vermont.
The potash fires were relighted; the lumberman's axe was busy again in the bloodless warfare against the giant pines; new acres of virgin soil were laid bare to the sun, and added to the broadening fields of tilth. White-winged sloops and schooners, and unwieldy rafts, flocked through the reopened gate of the country, and the clumsy Durham boat spread its square sail to the favoring north wind, and once more appeared on the broad lake where it had so long been a stranger. The shores were no longer astir with military preparations, but with the bustle of awakened traffic; soldiers had again become citizens; the ravages of war had scarcely touched the borders of the State, and in a few months there remained hardly a trace of its recent existence.
There had not been, nor was there for years after this period, a marked change in the social conditions of the people, for the old fraternal bonds of interdependence still held pioneer to pioneer almost as closely as in the days when the strong hand was more helpful than the long purse.
Class distinctions were marked vaguely, if at all, and there was no aristocracy of idleness, for it was held that idleness was disgraceful. The farmer who owned five hundred acres worked as early and as late as he who owned but fifty, and led his half-score of mowers to the onslaught of herdsgrass and redtop with a ringing challenge of whetstone on scythe, and was proud of his son if the youngster "cut him out of his swathe."
The matron taught her daughters and maids how to spin and weave flax and wool. The beat of the little wheel, the hum of the great wheel, the ponderous thud of the loom, were household voices in every Vermont homestead, whether it was the old log-house that the forest had first given place to, or its more pretentious framed and boarded successor. All the womenfolk knitted stockings and mittens while they rested or visited, the click of the needles accompanied by the chirp of the cricket and the buzz of gossip.
For workday and holiday, the household was clad in homespun from head to foot, save what the hatter furnished for the first and the traveling cobbler for the last.
Once a year the latter was a welcome visitor of every homestead in his beat, bringing to it all the gossip for the womenfolk, all the weighty news for the men, and all the bear stories for the children which he had gathered in a twelve months' "whipping of the cat," as his itinerant craft was termed. These he dispensed while, by the light of the wide fireplace, he mended old foot-gear or fashioned new, that fitted and tortured alike either foot whereon it was drawn on alternate days.
The old custom of making "bees," instituted when neighborly help was a necessity, was continued when it was no longer needed, for the sake of the merry-makings which such gatherings afforded. There were yet logging-bees for the piling of logs in a clearing, and raising-bees when a new house or barn was put up; drawing-bees when one was to be moved to a new site, with all the ox-teams of half a township; and bees when a sick or short-handed neighbor's season-belated crops needed harvesting.