on
wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and
surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed
clams and melted butter sauce. Hitty knew a fish market where the
clams were imported direct from Cape Cod by the nephew of a man who
used to go to school with her husband's brother, and he warranted
every clam she bought of him. They were served in soup plates and the
drawn butter in demi-tasses, but Hitty would have it no other way. The
_piece de resistance_ was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices
of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and
eggs--Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too--so white, so
golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to associate them
with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them
were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,--no wash-day cook ever
removed the peeling from an emergency potato,--and afterward a course
of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral
balls of dumplings that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of
hot huckleberry--not blueberry, but country huckleberry--sauce.

"Where's the coffee?" Nancy asked Dolly miserably, when the
humiliating meal was drawing to its close.

"She won't make coffee," Dolly whispered; "she says it will keep
everybody awake, and they're much better off without it, but Miss
Betty, she's watching her chance, and she's making it."

Collier Pratt had received each course in silence, but had eaten
heartily of the food that was set before him.

"I suppose he was hungry enough to eat anything," Nancy thought; "the
lunch was humiliating enough, but this surpasses anything I dreamed
of."

She had given up trying to estimate the calories that each man was
likely to average in partaking of Hitty's menu. She noticed that a
great many of her patrons had taken second helpings, and that threw
her out in her calculation of quantities, while the relative
digestibility of the protein and the fats in pork depend so much upon
its preparation that she could not approximate the virtue of Hitty's
bill of fare without consultation with Hitty.

"That was a very excellent dinner," Collier Pratt broke through her
painful reverie to make his pronouncement. "Astonishing, but very
satisfactory. It reminds me of days on my grandfather's farm when I
was a youngster."

"I should think it might," Nancy said, for the first time in her
relation with her n