--a fac-simile of the inscription upon the coffin-plate of that illustrious and well-beloved chief. The wool and flax were home productions, but the cotton was brought, in a raw state, from the West Indies. It was first picked over very carefully, to remove the seeds and stray bits of foreign rubbish, then "batted," that is, made into small pats, each large enough to be carded into a roll, which was spun into thread upon either a wool or linnen wheel. This "batting" usually fell to the lot of the children of the family, who probably found the monotonous task as little to their taste as their grandchildren do, when required to wash the dishes or saw wood for the cooking-stove. Woven plain, by the skilful hands of the housemother, and bleached upon the young grass under the blossoming apple boughs, the cloth served for the underwear of the family, and was regarded as one of the few luxuries of the frugal household,--the raw cotton costing over fifty cents a pound, to say nothing of the time and labor required to convert it into cloth. On account of the scarcity of cotton, our modern "comfortables" were a thing unheard of, and, for a substitute, woollen quilts, stuffed with wool, and closely quilted, often in the most elaborate patterns, were used in all New England households. These quilts were often few and thin in many a poor home, where the elders had hard work to shield their flock of little ones from the bitter cold of winter, in spite of the immense fires that even the poorest were able to provide where any amount of fuel could be had for the cutting. I have heard a story of a good lady who lived at that time in a town not a hundred miles from Boston, which gives one some idea of the straits to which our grandparents were often reduced in those days:-- Watching one bitterly cold night with a sick neighbor, she heard, at midnight, the little children crying with cold in the loft overhead, and leaving her sleeping patient, she went upstairs, and tried to find an extra quilt or blanket to spread over them. But in vain, for in that poor home there was not so much as a shoulder-blanket that could be spared. At last, in utter desperation, she spread over the shivering little ones a _side of leather_, that she found rolled up under the eaves. "It kept out the cold, anyhow," she said, as she told the story years afterwards. "And the poor little things stopped their cryin', and cuddled down as contented an' comfortable as a nestful o' kittens." If there was little of poetry or romance in the lives of those hard-working, hard farming men and women of a past generation, there was no lack of the patient diligence and simple, unquestioning faith, that give strength to weakness, and sweeten toil with the steadfast belief that, to the faithful heart and willing hand God's blessing never fails. One of the favorite proverbs at that time is significant, as proverbs usually are, of the character of the people:--