plicable, but the fact remains. Even Mary 'Liza shrank from contact
with the absurd object, and the moisture condensed into falling drops.

"Oh, Aunt Mary! do you think it _can_ be Preciosa? It looks like
a--_monster_!"

With tears running down his cheeks, and his sides shaking with gusts of
merriment, my father took me upon his knee, and gave me the funniest
kiss I ever had--a jerky kiss, as if a bee had bobbed against my mouth.

"You'll be the death of me yet, child!" And after another series of
side-shakings--"So much for circumstantial evidence!"

[Illustration]

Chapter XI

Frankenstein

The morning was biting cold. A northwest wind had been busy for hours
sweeping and dusting the sky until, now that it was resting from its
labors, the blue vault was as clean and bright as our mahogany
dining-table after Uncle Ike had polished it with beeswax and rosin.

At the breakfast-table the butter splintered off under the knife, and
the milk was frozen so hard that Mary 'Liza and I sugared it and made
believe it was ice-cream. When Gilbert, the under dining-room servant,
brought in the buckwheat cakes and waffles from the kitchen, he had to
cover them with a hot plate, and then run as hard as he could go across
the yard to the house, to keep them from chilling on the way.

There are no buckwheat cakes nowadays, like those that Aunt 'Ritta
made--glossy brown, all of a size, and porous as a sponge. It was great
fun to butter them, and then press them with the flat of a knife-blade,
to see spurts and spouts rise from the surface like so many hot oil
geysers.

That was the morning when I made the eight-cakes-and-one-sausage speech
that passed into a family proverb. The night before I had thrown a
candle-end, four inches long, into the fire, and my mother had told me
it was a Christian duty to be economical, defining the word for me.
Bent, as usual, upon practising what I learned, I divided my sausage
into eight bits, and ate one with each cake.

Cousin Molly Belle and Cousin Frank Morton had stayed all night with us,
and the talk at table was so lively that nobody noticed what I was
about. We were not allowed to chatter during meals when others than the
family were present, or, indeed, at any other time if grown people were
talking, until invited by them to take part in the conversation. So I
waited for a lull in the chat to say aside to my mother at whose left
hand I sat:--

"Mother! I have made one sausa