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

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
trees gave him both summer and winter apples and cider for
vinegar and apple butter. There in our memory still stands
the "Sixty-Bushel Tree;" I believe I would recognize it to-day
by the peculiar flavor of its fruit. For some time grandfather 's
house remained much as he had left it when the home-keeper
departed from it forever. The immense fireplace in the large
kitchen had still its iron crane and pothooks; grandmother's
teakettle, frying pans, and other cooking utensils were stored
in the pantry near by. Sometimes when I would miss grand-
father from our house I would go to search for him in his old
home. If it were winter time I would find him with a big fire
on the ample hearth, working away with saw and plane, perhaps
making a gate or again a broom; for he loved to work, even
in his seventy-first year.
Our grandfather had some of the Puritanic virtues, among
them a great reverence for the Sabbath day, which he pronounced
"Sab-day." When left at home with us children
while our parents were gone to the Carthage church, he would
often reprove us for romping and shaking the house, which
seemed to be so wicked that he could but rebuke us for our
profanation of this sacred day. He was indeed a pious man,
and read his Bible. He would recite long hymns in his own
way; sometimes we could understand his meaning and sometimes
not.
It was hard, even after the country was developed into a
land of plenty, for the old grandsire to feel it was just the thing
for us children to eat peaches and grapes without first asking
permission of our parents, and even then he did not understand
how we should eat all the fruit we might want. When
he would find peach pits under our trees he would ask us by
what authority we helped ourselves to them. We of course
knew that our mother allowed this privilege and that was all
the authority necessary, and yet from this distance it almost
seems, when we think how much our liberty troubled him,
that it would have been better to have talked it over with our
parents and had a clear understanding estabhshed with him
by them.
From the shady back porch where he took his seat the