.

"I mixed the bread last Friday night and made some biscuit in the
morning, and if I hadn't forgotten the salt they would have been
splendid. I don't remember all the verses about bread, but one verse
is:

"'Now you place it in the bread bowl,
A smooth and nice dough ball,
Last, a towel and a cover,
And at night that's all.
But when morning calls the sleeper
From her little bed,
She can make our breakfast biscuit
From that batch of bread.'"

"Well, it's girls' work to cook and boys' work to catch," said Al, who
was getting tired of hearing verses.

"Jeanie did some catching before she was five years old, and you
forget how nicely papa cooked the breakfast when you were camping out
last summer."

"I suppose his cooking, like Jeanie's fishing, was just an accident."

"No, indeed! Good cooking has to be learned," I said, "and this
picture makes me think of the first fish I had to cook, and what a
foolish girl I had."

"Oh, mamma's going to tell us a story about when she was a girl,"
Jeanie exclaims. So all take seats--Jeanie on my lap, the boys on the
two arms of my chair, and the three little sisters on chairs or
footstools.

Not about when I was a girl, but about when I was a very young wife.

You boys know that I had always lived in a big house in the city,
where the servants did all the cooking and such work, while I
practiced music or studied or visited my Sunday-school scholars. I was
just as fond of them in those days as I am now. Well! Your papa took
me to a dear little house, far, far away, near Lake George. I had a
very young girl to help me about the house, who did not know any thing
about cooking. I thought I knew a good deal, for I had learned to bake
bread, and roast meat and make a cup of tea or coffee. I had just as
much fun keeping house in that little cottage as Jeanie has playing
house up stairs. But one day papa went off in a hurry and forgot to
ask me what I wanted for dinner. He was to bring a gentleman home that
day and I hoped he would send me a good dinner.

About ten o'clock Annie, my little servant, came to me and said, "Oh,
ma'am, the butcher's here with a beautiful fish the master has sent
for the meat."

"A fish! Annie, do you know how to cook fish?" I said.

"No, ma'am. Only it's fried they mostly has 'em."

I went into the kitchen and there lay a beautiful trout--too pretty to
eat, it seemed to me. Certainly too pretty to be spoi