ashed and cleansed. The wife of
Colonel John May, a prominent man in Boston, wrote in her diary for one
day:--

"A large kettle of yarn to attend upon. Lucretia and self rinse,
scour through many waters, get out, dry, attend to, bring in, do up
and sort 110 score of yarn; this with baking and ironing. Then went
to hackling flax."

It should be remembered that all those bleaching processes, the wringing
out and rinsing in various waters, were far more wearisome then than
they would be to-day, for the water had to be carried laboriously in
pails and buckets, and drawn with pumps and well-sweeps; there were no
pipes and conduits. Happy the household that had a running brook near
the kitchen door.

Of course all these operations and manipulations usually occupied many
weeks and months, but they could be accomplished in a much shorter time.
When President Nott of Union College, and his brother Samuel, the famous
preacher, were boys on a stony farm in Connecticut, one of the brothers
needed a new suit of clothes, and as the father was sick there was
neither money nor wool in the house. The mother sheared some half-grown
fleece from her sheep, and in less than a week the boy wore it as
clothing. The shivering and generous sheep were protected by wrappings
of braided straw. During the Revolution, it is said that in a day and a
night a mother and her daughters in Townsend, Massachusetts, sheared a
black and a white sheep, carded from the fleece a gray wool, spun, wove,
cut and made a suit of clothes for a boy to wear off to fight for
liberty.

The wool industry easily furnished home occupation to an entire family.
Often by the bright firelight in the early evening every member of the
household might be seen at work on the various stages of wool
manufacture or some of its necessary adjuncts, and varied and cheerful
industrial sounds fill the room. The old grandmother, at light and easy
work, is carding the wool into fleecy rolls, seated next the fire; for,
as the ballad says, "she was old and saw right dimly." The mother,
stepping as lightly as one of her girls, spins the rolls into woollen
yarn on the great wheel. The oldest daughter sits at the clock-reel,
whose continuous buzz and occasional click mingles with the humming rise
and fall of the wool-wheel, and the irritating scratch, scratch, of the
cards. A little girl at a small wheel is filling quills with woollen
yarn for the loom, not a skilled work