s) a day for unskilled labor was thought high wages.

[Illustration: %Washington's flute and Miss Custis's harpsichord at
Mount Vernon%]

Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than
are such abodes in our day. There were no furnaces, no gas, no
bathrooms, no plumbing. Wood was the universal fuel. Coal from Virginia
and Rhode Island was little used. All cooking was done in "Dutch ovens,"
or in "out ovens," or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every
household. Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire.
In every city, therefore, were men known as "sweeps," whose business it
was to clean chimneys.

[Illustration: %Earthenware stove--Moravian%]

[Illustration: %Dutch oven%[1]]

[Footnote 1: The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and
hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a
rim to keep the coals on it.]

[Illustration: a foot stove]

Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a
cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper
and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.

[Illustration: Kitchen in Washington's headquarters in Morristown,
N.J.[1]]

[Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace.
Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old
Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]

[Illustration: A plow used in 1776]

His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed
was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped
with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of
his slaves.

%195. Negro Slavery.%--No living person under thirty years of age has
ever seen a negro slave in our country. When Washington was President
there were 700,000 slaves. When the Revolution opened, slavery was
permitted by law in every colony. But the feeling against it in the
North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began
the work of abolition. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the
constitutions of the states declared that "all men are born free and
equal," and that "all men are born equally free," and this was
understood to abolish slavery. In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in
1780. In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed
which provided that all children born of slave parents after a