After he was safely asleep, Dr. Ellis arose quietly and shut the window. He was awakened in the morning by some noise, and looking over his bedclothes, he saw Mr. Adams on his knees by the side of his open valise, from which he had taken his tinder box, and was getting a spark to touch off the kindlings in the grate. He scorned the use of the matches on the mantel, preferring the friends of his youth and age, which had been his faithful attendants through life.
There were few articles in domestic use in my youth more popular than the apple, and few performing such a variety of parts in the performances of the kitchen. A New England supper would have been incomplete without an apple pie. The English sneer at our corn, saying it is only fit for horses, while they worship their oats, which are more fit for the horse trough than the table. So, while they condemn our apple pie, made with a crust thoroughly baked, they gorge themselves in July and August and September with gooseberry and green gage tarts, which no armored war ship could resist if fired from a Whitworth gun at the distance of a mile. Behold the products of the apple, a roasted apple, a Marlboro pudding, looking like an ordinary pie without crust, a pan-dowdy, or apple grunt baked with molasses in a deep pan, and the crust broken in, pork and apples cut up together and cooked, called by the Dutch “speck and apple jees,” plain apple sauce, apple butter or Vermont apple sauce boiled with cider and put up for winter, apple brandy warranted to kill at thirty paces, called in New Jersey “Jersey lightning,” and apple pudding. To the apple then, notwithstanding John Bull, let the toast go round.
Perhaps in the history of man no article in common use has undergone greater changes than that used in writing, and many of those changes have occurred within my memory. The stylus of the ancients used on waxen tablets, has become a factor in the advance of civilization, until it may now be said that:
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.”
The stylus on waxen tablets gave way to reeds used with a fluid on papyrus, and reeds to quills of swans and geese and crows. For a long time geese were raised chiefly for their quills, and it is said that in one year twenty-seven millions of these quills were sent to England from St. Petersburg. Until the steel pen was introduced in my later youth, the goose quill held undivided sway in the United States, and for some years afterwards the price of the steel pen was not sufficiently reduced to admit of its popular use. In all the schools which I ever attended the teachers spent a large portion of their time in mending pens, an occupation so constant and universal as to introduce into our vocabulary the name “pen knife,” which still holds its place, though the use for which it was designed has departed. As late as 1858 and 1859, when I was in the senate, among the articles of stationery distributed among the members, were a bunch of quills and a pen knife. As John Quincy Adams once wrote in a lady’s album:
“In days of yore the poet’s pen
From wing of bird was plundered,
Perhaps of goose, but now and then
From Jove’s own eagle sundered.”