it their
domestic talent.

Such a housekeeper Marie St. Clare was not, nor her mother before her.
Indolent and childish, unsystematic and improvident, it was not to be
expected that servants trained under her care should not be so likewise;
and she had very justly described to Miss Ophelia the state of confusion
she would find in the family, though she had not ascribed it to the
proper cause.

The first morning of her regency, Miss Ophelia was up at four o'clock;
and having attended to all the adjustments of her own chamber, as
she had done ever since she came there, to the great amazement of the
chambermaid, she prepared for a vigorous onslaught on the cupboards and
closets of the establishment of which she had the keys.

The store-room, the linen-presses, the china-closet, the kitchen and
cellar, that day, all went under an awful review. Hidden things of
darkness were brought to light to an extent that alarmed all the
principalities and powers of kitchen and chamber, and caused many
wonderings and murmurings about "dese yer northern ladies" from the
domestic cabinet.

Old Dinah, the head cook, and principal of all rule and authority in
the kitchen department, was filled with wrath at what she considered
an invasion of privilege. No feudal baron in _Magna Charta_ times could
have more thoroughly resented some incursion of the crown.

Dinah was a character in her own way, and it would be injustice to her
memory not to give the reader a little idea of her. She was a native
and essential cook, as much as Aunt Chloe,--cooking being an indigenous
talent of the African race; but Chloe was a trained and methodical one,
who moved in an orderly domestic harness, while Dinah was a self-taught
genius, and, like geniuses in general, was positive, opinionated and
erratic, to the last degree.

Like a certain class of modern philosophers, Dinah perfectly scorned
logic and reason in every shape, and always took refuge in intuitive
certainty; and here she was perfectly impregnable. No possible amount of
talent, or authority, or explanation, could ever make her believe
that any other way was better than her own, or that the course she had
pursued in the smallest matter could be in the least modified. This had
been a conceded point with her old mistress, Marie's mother; and "Miss
Marie," as Dinah always called her young mistress, even after her
marriage, found it easier to submit than contend; and so Dinah had ruled
supreme. This