s had for the most part earthen floors, trenched
to make the smoke fires safe. Some had puncheon floors, with an earthen
hearth in the middle, whereupon was placed a furnace of loose
brick--that could be kicked over at need, smothering an outbreaking
fire. Still others had big cast iron kettles sunk in a sort of well in
the floor--with a handy water bucket for quenching fires. Whatever the
floor, eternal vigilance was the price of safe bacon--you looked at the
smokehouse fires first thing in the morning and last at night. They were
put out at sundown, but had a knack of burning again from some hidden
seed of live coal. Morning smoke could not well be too thick, provided
it smelled right--keen and clean, reminiscent of sylvan fragrance--a
thick, acrid smoke that set you sneezing and coughing, was "most
tolerable and not to be endured." It was not well to leave the smoke too
thick at night--somehow the chill then condensed it. A thin, blue,
hot-scented but cool, vapor was the thing to strive for then. There were
folk who suggested furnaces--with smoke pipes leading in--ever so much
safer they said, withal much less trouble. Why! even the smoke from a
cooking stove might be made to answer. But these progressives were heard
coldly--the old timers knew in right of tradition and experience, the
need of well ventilated smoke.

It gave this present chronicler a feeling of getting home again, to walk
through the curing rooms of perhaps the most famous bacon makers in the
world, and find them practicing the wisdom of her childhood. Namely
using hickory smoke not delivered from furnace pipes but welling up, up,
in beautiful wreathy spirals, to reach row on row of hams and
flitches--and to be told, by a kind person who did not know she already
knew, that their curing was patterned on the old English model--curing
in the smoke of great-throated stone hall chimneys. Yes--they had tried
pipes--furnaces likewise--but they gave too much heat, did not
distribute smoke evenly, besides being almost impossible of regulation.
Hence the smoldering hickory that was like a breath from a far past.

Notwithstanding, the chronicler is of opinion that folk who would like
to try their hands at bacon making may do it with a fair hope without
building regular smoke houses. To such she would say, get a stout
hogshead--a sugar hogshead preferable--nail on a board roof to shed
water, then set it upon a stout frame at least seven feet above ground.
Nail