t of person, and no English worth
mentioning. She came on us like a cyclone, and her speech was as a
spring torrent in volume. I happened to know one or two German words,
and when incautiously I chanced to let her have a look at them she
seized my hand and did a skirt dance. Then presently she ran out into
the kitchen, took everything from every shelf, and rearranged the
articles in a manner adapted to the uses of nothing human.

This was the beginning, and relentlessly she pursued her course, backed
up by a lifetime of experience, and the strong German traditions of
centuries.

The entire household was reorganized under her regime. The Little Woman
and the Precious Ones were firmly directed, and I was daily called to
account in a mixture of high-geared German and splintered English that
was fairly amazing in its quantity.

Nothing was so trivial as to escape Wilhelmine. Like all great
generals, she regarded even the minutest details as important, and I was
handled with no less severity for cutting an extra slice of bread than
for investing in a new rug for the front room. For, let it be said now,
Wilhelmine was economical and abhorred waste. Neither did she break the
crockery, and, unlike Rosa, she did not eat. She was no longer young and
growing, and the necessity of coaling-up every hour or two seemed to
have gone by.

But, alas! we would have preferred beautiful, young, careless,
larder-wrecking Rosa to Wilhelmine, the reformer. We would have welcomed
her with joy, and surreptitiously in whispers we hatched plots to rid
ourselves of the tyrant. Once I even went so far as to rebel and battle
with her in the very sanctity of the kitchen itself.

Not that Wilhelmine could not cook. In her own German cabbage-and-onion
way she was resourceful, and the house reeked with her combinations
until strong men shed tears, and even the janitor hurried by our door
with bowed head. I never questioned her ability to cook, but in the
matter of coffee she was hopeless. In the best German I could muster I
told her so. I told her so several times, so that it could sink in. I
said it over forward and backward and sideways, in order to get the
verbs right, and when she was through denouncing me I said that I would
give her an object lesson in making coffee in a French pot.

I am sure now that this was a mistake--that German blood could stand
almost anything in the world better than a French coffee-pot, but at the
time I did not rec