The pudding would stand straight up in its earthen pan, a quivering red, honey-combed mass, surrounded with a sea of juice to be eaten with rich real cream in clots of loveliness. The beans would be brown and whole, with the crisp home cured pork on top. That old New England cookery, it seems to me, filled a big bill for health and physical nourishment. We did not know much about proteins and calories and fibrins, in fact, we had never heard of them. But we somehow hit upon the best combinations as to taste and efficiency. We almost never had candy, and we rarely had all flour bread. A good deal of Indian meal went into my mother's bread. Our amusements in those days were primitive enough. On Old Election Day, which came the last Wednesday in May, there was just one thing to do. We youngsters had an election cake all shining with molasses on top, and raisins in the middle, and we went down to the beach and dug wells in the sand. Now and then we hunted Mayflowers (saxifrage) and played about the old fort left from the Revolution and now owned by Mr. F. L. Higginson. Evenings we had parties and played Copenhagen and hunt the slipper or knit the family stockings by our dim oil lamps. Winters, there were singing schools. Those were great larks if we came at the money to buy a copy of the "Carmina Sacra," or the "Shawm." I still think they were fine collections of tunes, comprising all the old standbys. Mrs. Lee's father, Mr. John Knowlton, was a wonderful singing master, and a great disciplinarian, with a beautiful bass voice. He would stand a good deal of fun at the recess, but when Mr. Knowlton struck his bell and took up his violin, we all knew it meant singing and no nonsense. I think my grandfather, Benjamin Ober, and Elsie's great-grandfather, Deacon David Larcom, were also singing masters in the old days, but neither Elsie nor I remember them,--old as we are. [Illustration: _From a Daguerreotype taken about 1859_] Over "t'other side," as we called it, in the house now owned by Mr. J. S. Curtis, lived Uncle "Jimmy" Woodbury. He must have been a "character." He was once very much troubled by rats in his barn. So he conceived a plan for getting rid of them at his neighbor's expense. Uncle David Preston's estate, where Miss Susan Amory's house now stands, was diagonally opposite. Uncle "Jimmy" wrote a letter to the rats, in which he told them that in Uncle David's barn was more corn and better corn than they were getting in his barn, and he strongly recommended that they move. Then Uncle Jimmy kept watch and on a beautiful moonlight night he had the satisfaction of beholding a long line of rodents with an old gray fellow as leader, crossing the road on their way to Uncle David's. (I tell the story as it was told to me). Uncle Jimmy's daughter, Mary, married Dr. Wyatt C. Boyden, for many years the skilful family physician of half the town. The fine public spirited Boydens of Beverly are her descendants.