meal which is added after, being unscalded, is not light, and would only
clog the cakes. And, in eating, the biscuits should be broken, never
sliced. They are in their prime when hot, quite as much as Ward
Beecher's famous apple-pie; but, unlike that, may be freshened afterward
by dipping in cold water and heating in a quick oven just before wanted.
In other words, they may be regenerated by immersion.

As to the system of this minute household,--if any should be curious to
know,--it was to have breakfast-dishes despatched, with the dinner
vegetables pared, at half past nine, A. M.; dinner out of hand by two,
P. M.; bread and butter and Cochituate precisely at six, P. M.

In one of Mr. and Mrs. Hall's "Memories of Authors," mention is made of
a little Miss Spence, who, with rather limited arrangements in two
rooms, used to give literary tea-parties, and was shrewdly suspected of
keeping her butter in a wash-bowl. I did not follow any such underhanded
proceeding. I kept my butter on the balcony. All-out-doors was my
refrigerator; and if one will look abroad some cool, glittering night,
he may yet see my oyster-pail hung by a star, or swinging on the horns
of a new moon.

Perhaps it is fair to mention, however, that on one glittering night the
mercury fell below zero, and the windows all froze hard down, and there
was the butter locked on the outer side! And oh! it is such a trying
calamity to be frozen in from one's butter! But after this experience
the housekeeper shrewdly watches for these episodes of weather, and
takes the jar in of a night. So it is that eternal vigilance is the
price even of butter.

Still it seemed that, with careful and economizing mind, on six feet by
thirteen it was not only possible to live, but to take table-boarders.
Certainly nothing could be gayer, unless to ramble delightfully forever
in one of those orange-colored ambrotype-saloons, drawn by milk-white
oxen; or to quarter like Gavroche of _Les Miserables_ among the ribs of
the plaster elephant in the Bastile; or more pensively to abide in the
crannied boat-cabin of the Peggotys, watching the tide sweep out and in.

This must be the weird, barbaric side of the before-named brick and
mortar flat of five rooms.

Pope, the tragedian, said that he knew of but one crime a man could
commit,--peppering a rump steak. It is an argument for boarding one's
self that all these comfortable crimes thus become feasible. One may
even butter her br