Most men, including the clergy, owned or rented farms and followed the plow in season, while wives and children did outdoor work from morning till night. Houses were built by the aid of neighbors in a single day, and extra rooms were improvised by the judicious hanging of quilts and curtains. A door in front and another in the rear allowed plenty of fresh air, though the large crevices between the logs usually rendered this superfluous. Floors were made of logs split in halves and laid "with backs downward." Beds and chairs were home-made and especially intended for the use of the older members of the family, boys and girls accommodating themselves with stools or blocks of wood sawed for the purpose. Meals were prepared in a few moments at the broad fireside, where a huge crane aided the mother in swinging her kettles on or off the blazing fire. In every pretentious home there was a loom for the weaving of cotton and woolen cloth for family or neighborhood consumption; and late at night the steady thump of the beam proclaimed the industry of the busy housewife as she put in the last threads of her "fifth" or "sixth yard." Few were so wealthy that they could afford the broadcloth which came up the rivers from New Orleans or over the Erie Canal from New York; and when some migrating Virginia squire or Kentucky colonel, master of a thousand acres of land, did so disport himself on Sundays or at the races, he appeared in his glossy suit, made by the hand of his devoted spouse, wrinkled and fretted in a hundred places, not unlike Lincoln when he first spoke at Cooper Institute, New York. Life was simple on the Western farm or distant frontier, but pleasure, too, had its place, English sports of Angevin times serving the place of baseball or golf of to-day. In the older West, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, the race-course was the common playground where horses and men ran their rounds and won their prizes. To drink deeply of the strong "corn" or "rye" was as common as is the drinking of wine in France; and races, corn-huskings, or weddings were seldom closed without drunkenness, and oftentimes fisticuffs or the more fatal duel with knife or pistol. Jackson had "killed his man," and Benton had been knocked through a trapdoor into the basement of a Nashville bar-room; Clay and Poindexter, the Mississippi Governor and Senator, had had more than one encounter in which life was set against life.