"Oh, she washed his hand and soaked it in strong soda and water,
baking-soda, and then she bound some soda right on, for good measure,
she said."

"There!" said Aunt Jessica. "Now you know two things to do for a bee
sting."

Elliott opened her eyes wide. "Why, so I do, don't I? I truly do."

"That's the way people learn," said Mother Jess, "by emergencies. It
is the only way they are sure to remember. Laura is helping Henry
milk. Suppose you make us some biscuit for supper, Elliott."

Elliott started to say, "I've never made biscuit," but shut her lips
tight before the words slipped out.

"I will tell you the rule. You'd better double it for our family.
Everything is plainly marked in the pantry. Perhaps the fire needs
another stick before you begin."

Carefully the girl selected a stick from the wood-box. "Just let me
get my apron, Aunt Jessica," she said.

CHAPTER IX

ELLIOTT ACTS ON AN IDEA

Six weeks later a girl was busy in the sunny white kitchen of the
Cameron farm. The girl wore a big blue apron that covered her gown
completely from neck to hem, and she hummed a little song as she moved
from sink to range and range to table. There was about her a delicate
air of importance, almost of elation. You know as well as I where
Elliott Cameron ought to have been by this time. Six weeks plus how
many other weeks was it since she left home? The quarantine must have
been lifted from her Uncle James's house for at least a month. But the
girl in the kitchen looked surprisingly like Elliott Cameron. If it
wasn't she, it must have been her twin, and I have never heard that
Elliott had a twin.

Though she was all alone in the kitchen--washing potatoes, too--she
didn't appear in the least unhappy. She went over to the stove, lifted
a lid, glanced in, and added two or three sticks of wood to the fire.
Then she brought out a pan of apples and went down cellar after a roll
of pie crust. Some one else may have made that pie crust. Elliott took
it into the pantry, turned the board on the flour barrel, shook flour
evenly over it from the sifter, and, cutting off one end of the pie
crust, began to roll it out thin on the board. She arranged the lower
crust on three pie-plates, and, going into the kitchen again, began to
peel the apples and cut them up into the pies. Perhaps she wasn't so
quick about it as Laura might have been, but she did very well. The
skin fell from her knife in long, thin, curly strips. Aft