led a minute, then she answered:

"Oh," says she, "fashion takes queer twists sometimes; in this case it
really is unaccountable. The people crowding into those wooden dens--and
the eating done there is wonderful."

"Eating!" says I, feeling my eyes grow big as saucers. "Eating! Do they
feed before folks, then?"

"Oh, yes; every lady goes; you never saw anything like it. Such
Rockaways and other bivalves are to be found nowhere else."

"Rockaways and bivalves!" thinks I to myself; "what kind of animals are
they? Never heard of bivalves before in my whole life, but the other
puts me in mind of old Grandma Frost's splint-bottomed rocking-chair. No
need of saying rock-away to her, for she was always on the teater. But
she's dead now, and the last time I ever saw her Boston rocker it was
away back of the chimney, at the old homestead, scrouged in between the
stones and the clapboards, with one rocker torn off and an arm broken. I
couldn't help asking Cousin E. E. if she remembered that chair.

"Oh, yes," says she; "somebody hustled it off into the garret the moment
she'd done with it. I saw it there a year after the funeral, with the
patchwork cushion of red and blue cloth moth-eaten and gray with dust."

Now, my father owned the old homestead while he lived, and I took this
as a slur on our branch of the Frost family. This riled me internally,
but I couldn't contradict her, and felt myself blushing hotly, rather
ashamed of the Frost family. But the truth is, as a race, we are none of
us given to much antiquity. No female of our family was ever known to
get over forty-nine in her own person, though many of them have lived to
a wonderful old age. This was curious, but a fact. Such unaccountable
things do sometimes run in families. But these are facts that I
sometimes choke down--I did it now.

"We were talking of something else, and got on to chairs," says I.

"No uncommon thing," says Cousin Dempster, laughing.

I laughed too, but that child turned up her sniffy nose, and, looking at
her father, said:

"The idea!" which wilted him down at once.

"But these bivalves and Rockaways--what do they do with them?"

"Why, eat them, of course."

"Eat them? How?"

"Raw."

"Mercy on me! Raw?"

"Well, Cousin E. E., it shan't be said that you are related to a coward.
I'll go down to see these city lions; but when?"

"Well, to-day," says Cousin Dempster. "Just come down to the office
about noon, and I'll go with you.