pected promptly at seven."

It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at
that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic
resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to
the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing
oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies,
doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with
indigestion.

The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the
buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very
vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the
corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach
the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one
sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn
from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the
snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved
the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that
meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of
the kitchen was celestial."

My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a
storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row
if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done
at four o'clock."

"O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days."

During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of
the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly
educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly
widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most
excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to
supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also
called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with
tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than
kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her
comment to me was a different matter.

That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon
learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too
good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a
life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle."

Uncle William, notwit