lishment, now entered the kitchen. Dinah had
heard, from various sources, what was going on, and resolved to stand
on defensive and conservative ground,--mentally determined to oppose and
ignore every new measure, without any actual observable contest.

The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great
old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it,--an arrangement
which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to exchange for
the convenience of a modern cook-stove. Not she. No Puseyite,* or
conservative of any school, was ever more inflexibly attached to
time-honored inconveniences than Dinah.

* Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), champion of the
orthodoxy of revealed religion, defender of the Oxford
movement, and Regius professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ
Church, Oxford.

When St. Clare had first returned from the north, impressed with the
system and order of his uncle's kitchen arrangements, he had largely
provided his own with an array of cupboards, drawers, and various
apparatus, to induce systematic regulation, under the sanguine
illusion that it would be of any possible assistance to Dinah in her
arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a
magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes
could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old
shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of
_vertu_, wherein her soul delighted.

When Miss Ophelia entered the kitchen Dinah did not rise, but smoked on
in sublime tranquillity, regarding her movements obliquely out of the
corner of her eye, but apparently intent only on the operations around
her.

Miss Ophelia commenced opening a set of drawers.

"What is this drawer for, Dinah?" she said.

"It's handy for most anything, Missis," said Dinah. So it appeared to
be. From the variety it contained, Miss Ophelia pulled out first a fine
damask table-cloth stained with blood, having evidently been used to
envelop some raw meat.

"What's this, Dinah? You don't wrap up meat in your mistress' best
table-cloths?"

"O Lor, Missis, no; the towels was all a missin'--so I jest did it. I
laid out to wash that a,--that's why I put it thar."

"Shif'less!" said Miss Ophelia to herself, proceeding to tumble over
the drawer, where she found a nutmeg-grater and two or three nutmegs, a
Methodist hymn-book, a couple of soiled Madras handkerchiefs, some ya