The men and women of those five generations were a poor, hard-working, sombre race,--rising early and working late,--laboriously earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. There were no labor reformers then. The men worked in the fields, the women in the house: the first tended the flocks, or planted and gathered the harvest;--the last busied themselves in the dairy and the kitchen, or at the spinning-wheel and the wash-tub. It is a tradition of the daughter of Parson Smith that with her own hands she scrubbed the floor of her bed-room the afternoon before her eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was born. There was no nonsense at least about that people; every one had work to do, and no one, gentle or simple, was above his work. For years there was a single school in the town, and the teacher was annually engaged by a vote in the town-meeting.[70] Subsequently his teaching was divided, the north precinct receiving eight months of his time and the south four; but this arrangement not proving satisfactory, the money raised for support of schools was finally divided between the precincts in proportion to their tax, and they were left to apply it each in its own way. But for us it is most curious to see through all these years how small were the expenses of the town and how large a proportion of the annual tax was applied to education. In the last century, before the War of Independence destroyed all measure of value, £120 ($420) of the old tenor, so called, was the average annual levy, and of this five-sixths went to the support of the schools. Expenditures on other accounts were necessarily very small. Until the year 1760 the highways were repaired by the labor of the people of the town, who, for this purpose appear to have been equally assessed. As, however, the disparity in wealth became greater and this burden heavier, the system was changed, and in 1760 every person paying a poll-tax was called on for a day’s labor, which was assessed at 2_s._ 1_d._ (35 cents), and those who also paid property taxes were further called on for as many additional days’ labor as 2_s._ 1_d._ were contained in the amount of their property tax.[71] The sparsely settled character of the town obviated all necessity of a fire department, though an entry in the records as early as 1651 gives a curious glimpse into the habits and dangers of a community before the blessed invention of lucifer matches. An order was then made by the selectmen, in consideration of “the great loss and damage that many & many a time doth fall out in this Towne by fire,” and because “no effort has been made to restrayne the carringe abroad of fiery sticks ... in mens hands, which is exceeding dangerous especially when the wind is high,”--in view of these facts the town fathers, under a penalty of twenty shillings for each offence, proceeded to forbid any one between March and November from transporting “any fire from one