ness.
Just when Elliott was thinking that she must begin to cook, something
was sure to rattle up to the door in a wagon, or roll up in an
automobile, or travel on foot in a basket. It was the extreme
timeliness of the gifts that proved the guiding intelligence behind
them.

"They couldn't all happen so," was Henry's conclusion. "Now, could
they? Gee! and I've thought some of those folks were pokes!"

"So have I," said Elliott, feeling very much ashamed of her hasty
judgments.

"You never know till you get into trouble how good people are," was
Father Bob's verdict.

Gertrude fingered a doughnut ruefully. "I want it, but I'm almost
ashamed to eat it. I've thought such horrid things of that old Mrs.
Gadsby that made 'em."

"They're good," said Tom. "Mrs. Gadsby knows how to make doughnuts, if
she _has_ got a tongue in her head! Say, but I'd as soon have thought
old Allen would send us doughnuts as the Gadsby."

"Mr. Allen brought us a tongue this morning," Elliott remarked; "said
his housekeeper boiled it; hoped it wasn't too tough to eat. You
couldn't 'git nothin' good, these days!'"

"_Enoch_ Allen?" demanded Henry; "the old fellow that lives at the
foot of the hill? Go tell that to the marines!"

"I don't know where he lives," said Elliott, "but he certainly said
his name was Enoch Allen."

Bruce chuckled. "Mother Jess's chickens have come home to roost, all
right."

"What did she ever do for Enoch Allen?" asked Tom.

"Oh, don't you remember," cried Gertrude, "the time his old dog died?
Mother found the dog one day, dying in the woods. I was along and she
sent me to call Mr. Allen, while she stayed with the dog. I was just a
little girl and kind of scared, but Mother said Mr. Allen wasn't
anybody to be afraid of; he was just a lonely old man. I heard him
tell her it wasn't every woman would have stayed with his dog. It was
dead when he got there."

But even with competent advisers within call and all the aids that
came in the shape of "Mother Jess's chickens," and with the best
family in the world all eagerness to be helpful and to "carry
on" during Laura and Mother Jess's absence, Elliott found that
housekeeping wasn't half so simple as it looked.

Life still had its moments and she was in the midst of one of the
worst of them now. If you have ever stood in a kitchen where little
gray kittens of dust rollicked under the chairs and all the dinner
kettles and pans were piled on the table, unscraped a