Each member had a share in the day's work, therefore to
each it was home. To the old homestead many a successful business man
returns to show his grandchildren the attic with its disused loom and
spinning-wheel; the shop where farm-implements were made, in the days of
long winter storms, to the accompaniment of legend and gossip; the dairy,
no longer redolent of cream. These are reminders of a time past and gone,
before the greed of gain had robbed even these houses of their peace. The
backward glance of this generation is too apt to stop at the transition
period, when the factory had taken the interesting manufactures out of the
hands of the housewife and left the homestead bereft of its best, when the
struggle to make it a modern money-making plant, for which it was never
designed, drove the young people away to less arduous days and more
exciting evenings.
This stage of farm life was altogether unlovely, not wholly of necessity,
but because the adjustment was most painful to the feelings and most
difficult to the muscles of the elders.
Because the family ideal was the ruling motive, the house-building of the
colonial period shows a more perfect adaptation to family life than any
other age has developed.
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