Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

8o ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
of flannel until it shone in the sunHght. This was quite
characteristic of the Scudder family, always industrious and
doing things in the nick of time.
Mrs. Norton's sister, Rachel Scudder Stephens, was also
a lovely old lady whom, though she was father's cousin, we
always called "Aunt Rachel." She would make long visits
at our home in the summertime and she and mother were
fond of each other. These two congenial spirits would spend
the early morning hours in doing up the work and shelling peas
and stringing beans on the shady back porch. When that
was done they would get their sewing, for everything was then
made by hand and the moments were valuable. Aunt Rachel
was a fine needlewoman, as were all of the Scudder women.
It is a joy to recall the quietude of the farm and the dear
old friends who shared with us its rural comforts. I remember
a year of plenty when our trees were bending beneath their
load of apples; people came out from the city and saw the fruit
rotting on the ground by bushels, and thought how glad they
would be for these culls from which to make apple butter.
Among them was a frieild of our parents, Rebecca Tomlinson,
an unmarried woman of perhaps forty-five years. She
was a seamstress, and went about among her friends helping
in the housework and sewing at intervals. She saw how our
fruit was going to decay and thought out a scheme by which
she could help to save a lot of our apples by drying them or
making apple butter. She donned some old clothes and borrowed
a large copper kettle from Aunt Betsy McCash, and
went to work with enthusiasm to "save the fruit." She first
gathered the sweet apples and boiled them and pressed out
the juice; next she boiled this juice down almost to molasses
to help sweeten the apple butter. The best windfalls were
now picked up, and in the evenings she would pare and core
and quarter her fruit.
In the morning the big copper kettle was hung from a pole
supported by forked posts out near the woodpile, where
"old Aunt Becky" made ready to operate her apple butter
works. Here she stood and stirred with a long ladle made
for the purpose; day after day, in rain or shine, she kept the