The boys dressed the flax, the girls spun the tow, The music of mother’s footwheel was not slow. The flax on the bended pine distaff was spread, With squash shell of water to moisten the thread. Such were the pianos our mothers did keep Which they played on while spinning their children to sleep. My mother I’m sure must have borne off the medal, For she always was placing her foot on the pedal. The warp and the filling were piled in the room, Till the web was completed and fit for the loom, Then labor was pleasure, and industry smiled, And the wheel and the loom every trouble beguiled, And there at the distaff the good wives were made. Thus Solomon’s precepts were fully obeyed. The manufacture of the farm-reared wool was not so burdensome and tedious a process as that of flax, but it was far from pleasant. The fleeces of wool had to be opened out and cleaned of all sticks, burrs, leaves, feltings, tar-marks, and the dirt which always remained after months’ wear by the sheep; then it had to be sorted out for dyeing, which latter was a most unpleasant process. Layers of the various colors of wools after being dyed were rolled together and carded on coarse wool-cards, again and again, then slightly greased by a disagreeable and tiresome method, then run into rolls. The wool was spun on the great wheel which stood in the kitchen with the reel and swifts, and often by the glowing firelight the mother spun. A tender and beautiful picture of this domestic scene has been drawn by Dr. Gurdon Russell, of Hartford, in his _Up Neck in 1825_. My mother was spinning with the great wheel, the white rolls of wool lay upon the platform, and as they were spun upon the spindle, she turning the wheel with one hand, and with extended arm and delicate fingers holding the roll in the other, stepping backwards and forwards lightly till it was spun into yarn, it formed a picture to me, sitting upon a low stool, which can never be forgotten. Her movements were every grace, her form all of beauty to me who opposite sat and was watching her dextrous fingers.