The old fireplaces have cranes and iron “dogs,” are festooned with ears of yellow seed-corn, and are surmounted by the old fire-arms, while by the chimney sides are hung old-fashioned brooms of peeled birch. These brooms are made of birch splints, carefully split and peeled, and tied in place with hempen twine on the strong handle; and many a farmer’s boy, years ago, earned his first spending-money by making them, for six cents apiece, for the country stores. Old settles, chairs, and tables stand on the white-scoured floors; and in the “living-room” is a piece of furniture seldom seen in New England, though common enough in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey in olden times—a “slaw bank.” The word is a corruption of _sloap bancke_, or sleeping bench, and the slaw bank was the great-grandfather of our modern cabinet folding-bed. At one end of the room are doors apparently belonging to cupboards, which, upon being swung wide open, disclose the oblong frame of a bed with a network of ropes to serve as springs. This bed-frame is fastened at one end to the wall with heavy hinges, and was hooked up against the wall in the day-time, and at night was lowered to a horizontal position and supported on heavy wooden turned legs, which fitted into sockets in the frame; and it was thus ready for use. This bed is still kept made up as of old, with hand-spun linen sheets, hand-woven “flannel sheets,” a “rising-sun” patchwork quilt, and blue and white woollen bedspread. But in the dining-room and kitchen of this old Shrewsbury homestead are the greatest treasures—corner cupboards and shallow dressers full of pewter dishes, which greet their owner with “shining morning faces” at breakfast, and reflect in a hundred silvery disks the goodly cheer on his table at midday and night. Round plates and platters are there of every size, up to the great round shield on which was placed of old the enormous Thanksgiving turkey. All are round, for oval platters seem to have been then unknown. The deep bowls, in which vegetables were served, stand there in “nests” of various sizes. Teapots, too, and cream-pitchers and sugar-bowls, or sugar-boxes, but no pewter teacups. I believe the little handleless teacups were among the earliest pieces of porcelain imported from China, and were often used when the rest of the “tea equipage” was of pewter. Pewter salt-cellars, mustard-pots, flip-mugs, and syrup-cups are interspersed among the larger pieces on the dresser. Some of these articles are marked with initials and dates, not engraved, but stamped, as with a die, J. S. and B. K., 1769. Doubtless these were wedding gifts, and I doubt not that a set of shining pewter plates and platters was as graceful and welcome a gift to Betsey Sumner in 1769, as is a set of Royal Worcester porcelain to her great-granddaughter Bessie, in 1892.