The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-08-24

0lae MIL II was H0t u41Go4Ii4l4oA 4A4 the Olden days to mention every arti- ele Of furniture, every household utensil, down tO a single teacup or spoon. in ones will. It was the custom to give in such full detail list of ones pos sessions that not even shOebuckle or candlcstick was overlooked.
 That warming pan has been in our family nearly two hundred years" said an old woman. showing the writer some of her attic treasures. Tt was the custom, you know, to fill the pan with hot cOals and pass it between the sheets of the bed on cold winter nights. And this little old foot stove came to me from my grandmother. She carried it to church hundreds of times, and sat with her feet on it during those long, long sermons in the unheated churches they had in those days. And you know it was the custom for the minister to preach all the way from two to three hours, and nowadays people begin to yawn and they make com piaint if the preacher holds forth longer than thirty minutes, even in the beautiful and IuxuriOusly cOmfOr- table church we have in this day. Think of what it used to be when folks rode eight or ten miles to church in the
 biting cold and then had to sit in a church like 8 refrigerator without a sign of a stove in it. l guess these little foot stoves came in very handy in those days"
 One is sure to. find in the old attic the spinning wheel without which no young woman felt that she could be- gin her married life in the days of. long ago. Her evenings were spent before 1t and her spinning was her pick up'' work throughout the entire day. Thhe old loom, clumsy and with tremen- dous possibilities as a producer of backache. bears silent testimony to the days when nearly every housewife woye the cloth for the garments of the entire family. She wove her own sheets and bedspreads, or "kiYerlids," as they were sometimes called. If she had carpet at all it was made of rags she had cut and sewn together with patient care and then woven into q carpet with her own hands. Rag carpets are still woven in some rural homes, but the linen sheets and the blue and white or blue and red bed spreads are woven no more.
 The old churn, an object of bathing to the boys and girls who had to work it's dasher up and down, before the butter would come, has had it's use fulness brought to a close by the modern creamery. and the custom of buttermaking has become obsolete in nearly all farmhouses. The cream cry man." an unheard of individual quarter of century ago, now gees his rounds collecting the milk and cream from the farms, and the rural housewife does not make even the but ter used by her own family.
 Hanging from some dust covered beam in the attic are the old candle could in which the housewife used to mould her candles, if she did not make them by the slower process of dip ping" them. What housewife of to- day dips tallert&or would dip" 1t without protest? When she thinksgof her candle dipping days and of the tlickering, feeble light candles prodlic- ed, when compared to the lamps she has to-day, the housewife is inclined to regard the Standard Oil Company as something of blessing, after all. She is also thankful that customs change even in the matter of diet, ad that the farmer who once lived al-s most wholly on pork, when 1t came to meat, now uses almost no pork at all. Butchering day has become thing of the past on many farms, and lard has almost disappeared from some pantries in which it was never absent in the days of long ago. The housewife does not fry everything ill 8 sputtering lake of fat as she once did, although there are rural localities in which the frying ban still takes first rank as cooking utensil, and everything that can be fried goes into it.
 Rusty old scythes bear testimony to the fact that time was when the sound of the reaper and mower was not heard in the land, and the farmer swung his scythe from morning until night, cut ting less with it in a day than he can now cut in an hour with the mower of
 
 day owes much to the inventive genius of the men of recent years, for his barn is supplied with labor saving imple- ments of which his ancestors on the farm he now owns knew nothing. He may work as hard as they did, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that his work counts for much more with the implements he has at hand.
 We are not, like the people of many other lands, conservative in regard to adopting new customs and new in- Iventions when we see that they are bet ter than old customs and old inven- tions. We are not bound by custom nor by sentiment to the ways of our ancestors, although the writer knows of one old woman living ill the heart of the city of Boston who to-day prepares all her meals over the coals in the fireplace in which her mother and her grandmother cooked. She will have nothing to do with any ''newfangled" ways of cooking, and that blessing of the housewife of to-day, the beautifully appointed kitchen range, has no charms for her.
 Modern invention has driven to the attic many household utensils once in common and wearisome use, and cus- tom has wrought such changes that if our ancestors who have been lying in their graves these hundred years could