ding in bedrooms. One diary, written
in Marshfield, Massachusetts, tells of a basin of water standing on the
bedroom hearth, in front of a blazing fire, in which the water froze
solid. President John Adams so dreaded the bleak New England winter and
the ill-warmed houses that he longed to sleep like a dormouse every
year, from autumn to spring. In the Southern colonies, during the fewer
cold days of the winter months, the temperature was not so low, but the
houses were more open and lightly built than in the North, and were
without cellars, and had fewer fireplaces; hence the discomfort from the
cold was as great, if not the positive suffering.

The first chilling entrance into the ice-cold bed of a winter bedroom
was sometimes mitigated by heating the inner sheets with a warming-pan.
This usually hung by the side of the kitchen fireplace, and when used
was filled with hot coals, and thrust within the bed, and constantly and
rapidly moved back and forth to keep from scorching the bed-linen. The
warming-pan was a circular metal pan about a foot in diameter, four or
five inches deep, with a long wooden handle and a perforated metal
cover, usually of copper or brass, which was kept highly polished, and
formed, as it hung on the wall, one of the cheerful kitchen discs to
reflect the light of the glowing fire. The warming-pan has been deemed
of sufficient decorative capacity to make it eagerly sought after by
collectors, and a great room of one of these collectors is hung entirely
around the four walls with a frieze of warming-pans.

Many of our New England poets have given us glimpses in rhyme of the
old-time kitchen. Lowell's well-known lines are vivid enough to bear
never-dying quotation:--

"A fireplace filled the rooms one side
With half a cord of wood in--
There warn't no stoves (tell comfort died)
To bake ye to a puddin'.

"The wa'nut log shot sparkles out
Towards the pootiest--bless her!
An' little flames danced all about
The chiny on the dresser.

"Agin the crumbly crooknecks hung,
An' in amongst 'em rusted
The old queen's-arm that granther Young
Fetched back from Concord busted."

To me the true essence of the old-time fireside is found in Whittier's
_Snow-Bound_. The very chimney, fireplace, and hearthstone of which his
beautiful lines were written, the kitchen of Whittier's boyhood's home,
at East Haverhill, Massachusetts, is shown in the accom