o a
pleasant odor of cookery. "Take off your things and sit down.
Breakfast's most ready. My land, I guess you must be pretty nigh starved
to death. Quimby told me who was cooking for you, and I says to Quimby:
'What,' I says, 'that no account woman-hater messing round at a woman's
job, like that,' I says. 'Heaven pity the people at the inn,' I says.
'Mr. Peters may be able to amuse them with stories of how Cleopatra
whiled away the quiet Egyptian evenings,' I says, 'and he may be able to
throw a little new light on Helen of Troy, who would object to having it
thrown if she was alive and the lady I think her, but,' I says, 'when it
comes to cooking, I guess he stands about where you do, Quimby.' You
see, Quimby's repertory consists of coffee and soup, and sometimes it's
hard to tell which he means for which."

"So Mr. Peters has taken you in on the secret of the book he is writing
against your sex?" remarked Billy Magee.

"Not exactly that," Mrs. Quimby answered, brushing back a wisp of gray
hair, "but he's discussed it in my presence, ignoring me at the time.
You see, he comes down here and reads his latest chapters to Quimby o'
nights, and I've caught quite a lot of it on my way between the
cook-stove and the sink."

"I ain't no judge of books," remarked Mrs. Norton from a comfortable
rocking-chair, "but I'll bet that one's the limit."

"You're right, ma'am," Mrs. Quimby told her. "I ain't saying that some
of it ain't real pretty worded, but that's just to hide the falsehood
underneath. My land, the lies there is in that book! You don't need to
know much about history to know that Jake Peters has made it over to fit
his argument, and that he ain't made it over so well but what the old
seams show here and there, and the place where the braid was is plain as
daylight."

After ten more minutes of bustle, Mrs. Quimby announced that they could
sit down, and they were not slow to accept the invitation. The breakfast
she served them moved Mr. Magee to remark:

"I want to know where I stand as a judge of character. On the first
night I saw Mrs. Quimby, without tasting a morsel of food cooked by her,
I said she was the best cook in the county."

The professor looked up from his griddle cakes.

"Why limit it to the county?" he asked. "I should say you were too
parsimonious in your judgment."

Mrs. Quimby, detecting in the old man's words a compliment, flushed an
even deeper red as she bent above the stove. Under the