The sawing and chopping of wood was a never diminishing incubus; this outdoor work on wood was continued within doors in the series of articles fashioned for farm and domestic use by the boy's jack-knife and the few heavy carpenter's tools at his command; some gave to the farm boy the rare pennies of his spending money. The making of birch splinter brooms was the best paying work. For these the boy got six cents apiece. The splitting of shoe-pegs was another. Setting card-teeth was for many years the universal income furnisher for New England children. Gathering nuts was a scantily paid-for harvest; tying onions a less pleasing one, and chiefly followed in the Connecticut Valley. The crop of wild cherries known as chokecherries was one of the most lucrative of the boy's resources. They were much desired for making cherry-rum or cherry-bounce, and would fetch readily a dollar a bushel. A good-sized tree would yield about six bushels. J. T. Buckingham tells of his first spending money being ninepence received from a brush-maker for hog-bristles saved from slaughtered swine. The story of various silk fevers which raged in America cannot be given here, romantic as they are. From the first venture the care of silkworms was held to be a specially suitable work for children. It was said two boys, "if their hands be not sleeping in their pockets," could care for six ounces of seed from hatching till within fourteen days of spinning, when "three or four more helps, women and children being as proper as men," had to assist in feeding, cleansing, airing, drying, and perfuming them. The _Reformed Virginia Silk Worm_ asserted:-- "For the Labour of a man and boy They gain you Sixty pounds which is no toy." Mulberry trees were planted everywhere and kept low like a hedge, so children could pick the leaves. All the books of instruction of the day reiterate that a child ten years of age could easily gather seventy-five pounds of mulberry leaves a day, and make great wages. But an old lady, now eighty years old, who made much sewing silk in Connecticut in her youth, writes thus to me: "Girls picked most of the leaves. It was very hard work and very small pay. They had ten cents a bushel for picking. Some could pick three bushels a day."