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:--

"Begin your web, and God will supply you with thread."

While still another suggests that well-known element in the New England
character that the Scotch aptly call "canny":--

"A wise man will bend a little rather than be torn up by the roots."

Extravagance was more than a fault, it was an actual sin, in the eyes of
these prudent, simple-living folk, and you may have heard before the
story of the ingenious housewife, who, tired of the blank bareness of
her yellow-painted floors, conceived the bold idea of manufacturing a
carpet for it herself:

A large square of sail-cloth served her for a canvas, and upon this she
painted, with the few colors that she could procure, a pattern of
flowers of every kind that she was familiar with,--blue roses and green
lilies having the preference