The log-house, that was reared amid its brotherhood of stumps, decayed with them, and was superseded by a more pretentious frame-house, whose best apartment, known as the "square room," came to know the luxury of a rag carpet, or at least a painted floor, that heretofore had been only sanded, and a Franklin stove, a meagre apology for the generous breadth of the great fireplace whose place it took. There was yet a fireplace in the kitchen, down whose wide-throated chimney the stars might shine upon the seething samp-pot swinging on the trammel and the bake-kettle embedded and covered in embers. Great joints of meat were roasted before it on the spit, biscuits baked in a tin oven, and Johnny-cakes tilted on oaken boards. Around this glowing centre the family gathered in the evening, the always busy womenfolk sewing, knitting, and carding wool; the men fashioning axe-helves and ox-bows, the children popping corn on a hot shovel, or conning their next day's lessons; while all listened to the grandsire's stories of war and pioneer life, or to the schoolmaster's reading of some book seasoned with age, or of the latest news, fresh from the pages of a paper only a fortnight old. The fire gave better light for reading and work than the tallow dips, to whose manufacture of a year's supply one day was devoted, marked in the calendar by greasy discomfort. For the illumination of the square room on grand occasions, there were mould candles held in brass sticks, while these and the dips were attended by the now obsolete snuffers and extinguisher. Close by the kitchen fireplace, and part of the massive chimney stack, whose foundations filled many cubic yards of the cellar, the brick oven held its cavernous place, and was heated on baking days with wood specially prepared for it. Oven and fireplace gave away after a time to the sombre but more convenient cook-stove, and with them many time-honored utensils and modes of cookery fell into disuse. Wool-carding machines were erected at convenient points, and hand-carding made no longer necessary. Presently arose factories which performed all the work of cloth-making (carding, spinning, weaving, and finishing), so that housewife, daughter, and hired girl were relieved of all these labors, and the use of the spinning-wheel and hand-loom became lost arts. When it became cheaper to buy linen than to make it, the growing of flax and all the labors of its preparation were abandoned by the farmer. As wood grew scarcer and more valuable than its ashes, the once universal and important manufacture of pot and pearl ashes was gradually discontinued; and as the hemlock forests dwindled away, the frequent tannery, where the farmers' hides were tanned on shares, fell into disuse and decay.