In those days, housekeeping was a very simple matter. Neither steam-engines nor patent cook-stoves were yet known, as necessary adjuncts to a kitchen; the housewife would have "turned up her nose" in contempt of a bake-oven: would have thrown a "Yankee reflector" over the fence, and branded the innovator with the old-fashioned gridiron. Tin was then supposed to be made only for cups and coffee-pots: pie-pans had not yet even entered "the land of dreams;" and the tea-kettle, which then "sang songs of family glee," was a quaint, squat figure, resembling nothing so much as an over-fed duck, and poured forth its music from a crooked, quizzical spout, with a notch in its iron nozzle. If its shut-iron lid was ornamented with a brass button, for a handle, it was thought to be manufactured in superior style. Iron spoons were good enough for the daintiest mouth; and a full set of pewter was a household treasure. China dishes and silver plate had been heard of, but belonged to the same class of marvellous things, with Aladdin's lamp and Fortunatus's purse. Cooking was not yet reduced to a science, and eating was like sleep--a necessity, not a mere amusement. The only luxuries known, were coffee and sugar; and these, with domestics and other cotton fabrics, were the chief articles for which the products of the earth were bartered. French cloths and Parisian fashions were still less known than silver spoons and "rotary stoves." The men wore homemade jeans, cut after the _mode_ of the forest: its dye a favorite "Tennessean" brownish-yellow; and the women were not ashamed to be seen in linsey-wolsey, woven in the same domestic loom. Knitting was then not only an accomplishment, but a useful art; and the size which a "yarn" stocking gave to a pretty ankle, was not suffered to overbalance the consideration of its comfort. The verge of nakedness was not then the region of modesty: the neck and its adjacent parts were covered in preference to the hands; and, in their barbarous ignorance, the women thought it more shame to appear in public half-dressed, than to wear a comfortable shoe. They were certainly a very primitive people--unrefined, unfashionable, "coarse"--and many of their sons and daughters are even now ashamed to think what "savages" their parents were! In their mode of life, they sought comfort, not "appearances;" and many things which their more sophisticated descendants deem necessaries, they contemned as luxuries.