THE PRIMITIVE METHOD
The process of making wax from honey-comb may be primitive and yet quite successful. Well do we remember the method as practised in the days of our early youth in the kitchen of the old farm-house, usually a comfortable and altogether delightful room. Its yellow-painted floor seemed to have caught the sunshine streaming in through white-curtained windows and held it there for us to tread upon. The chintz-covered settee and Boston rockers, and a few widths of bright rag carpet, made one end a cozy sitting-room. At the opposite end the cupboards, their shelves covered with elaborately scalloped newspapers, and beset with orderly dishes and tinware, bespoke the kitchen. Midway between stood the heavy cherry drop-leaf table which revealed the dining-room; in the midst of this Protean apartment stood the cook-stove, polished so that it would put to shame the rosewood case of a piano, bearing on its top the pink-copper tea-kettle singing gayly after its daily bath of cleansing buttermilk, and holding within the roaring fire which ever seemed the spirit and soul of the place. The neatness that held sway in this kitchen was the perfect sort that conduces to comfort, and not to misery. Only at certain periods was this delectable room given over to discomfort and untidiness; these included "wash-days," the days following the yearly sacrificial rite of butchering and the days when beeswax was made.
