Harriet Beecher said once that work, thrift and industry are the incessant steam-power of Yankee life; certainly none of her family seems to have been in any degree scared by the prospect of hard work. Harriet’s brother Edward makes light of the labor in a very jolly letter which he sent in 1821 to his stepmother. “And what shall I say more? Shall I speak of our orchard, from which the gale blew off apples enough for twenty barrels of cider, and whereon are yet cider and winter apples without number? Or of our cellar wherein are barrels small and great, moreover bins, boxes, cupboards, which I have arranged, having cleansed the cellar with bezom, rake, and wheelbarrow? Or of our garden, in which were weeds of various kinds, particularly pig; yea, also beets, carrots, parsnips and potatoes, the like of which was never seen?”[1] And Dr. Beecher himself, writing to one of the boys in July, 1819, tells how he has weeded the parsnips and beets, has planted potatoes in the orchard, plowed the yard and carried out the stones. With some help he has got out in two days a pile of stones as big as the salt mountain in Louisiana! After that they set to and tore down a useless eighty-year-old barn. The garden, he went on to say, was waving with corn, canteloupes, cabbages and pumpkins. The peas were some of them big enough to eat but had politely waited for the younger brethren around them to come to maturity so that they might all have the pleasure of being eaten together! The raspberries were so thick that one could not see between them, nor even stick between them a sharp-pointed knife. “Can you not find out by algebra,” he asks, “how many there will be?” So he goes on through the list--lettuce, radishes, pepper-grass, carrots, etc. “The garden gates shut,” he continues, “as regularly as they open, and no creature can get in except the hens, which are now about tired of coming, as they are sure to be saluted quite unexpectedly with a charge of powder, ‘speaking terror from the gun muzzle.’ Do you know,” he asks his son, “from whom the quotation is made? Some poet, you perceive.” So the wise father mixed instruction with gossip and made a game of work.