ok a new turn, and came out in a grand eating
department, crowded full of tables, where ever so many gentlemen and
ladies were eating, talking, laughing, and drinking bottled cider till
their eyes sparkled.

I went into the room with that quiet dignity which some people have said
was the greatest charm of your missionary, and spreading out my skirts a
little, sat down by one of the tables. A very genteel young man came up
to me that minute, as hospitable as could be, and asked with a bow what
I would please to have.

"Oh, almost anything that isn't too much trouble," says I.

Says he, "There is everything on the cart."

He pronounced "cart" with a drawl that riled me, for, if there is
anything I hate, it is the stuck-up way some people have of twistifying
common words: but I didn't want to rebuke the fellow too much, and
answered in the bland and Christian way you have so often praised, my
dear sisters, that I did not wish to stay long enough for them to unload
a cart, but if he had just as lief as not, would take some baked pork
and beans--that is, if there was any handy.

The fellow shook his head.

"No pork and beans!" says I; "do you call this national house-keeping?"

That brought the fellow up to a sense of duty in no time. He snatched up
a little thin book that lay on the table, read it a minute, and then
went off. By and by he came back with a dish in his hand, on which were
a few beans, all brown and crisped to death, with a skimpy slice of pork
lying across the top.

I took the dish in my hands, and examined it up and down, right and
left, with an air that must have cut that fellow to the soul, if he had
one.

"You call that pork and beans?" says I, a-lifting my forefinger, and
almost shaking it at him. "Why, young man, it looks more like a handful
of gravel-stones."

The young man spread his hands a little, and looked so confused that I
began to feel sorry for him.

"Never mind," says I; "no doubt you have had the awful misfortune of
being born out of New England, and that is punishment enough. It is the
fault of our Congressmen if the great New England mystery of baked beans
has not been explained and elucidated in the national kitchen," says I,
"most people do degenerate so when they once get out of the pure
mountain air. But then our statesmen may consider this a woman's
mission. Perhaps it is. There was a time when females understood such
things, but we have got to hankering after offices an