h had ruled
supreme. This was the easier, in that she was perfect mistress of that
diplomatic art which unites the utmost subservience of manner with the
utmost inflexibility as to measure.

Dinah was the mistress of the whole art and mystery of excuse-making, in
all its branches. Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do
no wrong, and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and
shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain
her own immaculateness entire. If any part of the dinner was a failure,
there were fifty indisputably good reasons for it, and it was the fault,
undeniably, of fifty other people, whom Dinah berated with unsparing
zeal.

But it was very seldom that there was any failure in Dinah's last
results. Though her mode of doing everything was peculiarly meandering
and circuitous, and without any sort of calculation as to time and
place,--though her kitchen generally looked as if it had been arranged
by a hurricane blowing through it, and she had about as many places for
each cooking utensil as there were days in the year,--yet, if one could
have patience to wait her own good time, up would come her dinner in
perfect order, and in a style of preparation with which an epicure could
find no fault.

It was now the season of incipient preparation for dinner. Dinah, who
required large intervals of reflection and repose, and was studious of
ease in all her arrangements, was seated on the kitchen floor, smoking a
short, stumpy pipe, to which she was much addicted, and which she always
kindled up, as a sort of censer, whenever she felt the need of an
inspiration in her arrangements. It was Dinah's mode of invoking the
domestic Muses.

Seated around her were various members of that rising race with which a
Southern household abounds, engaged in shelling peas, peeling potatoes,
picking pin-feathers out of fowls, and other preparatory arrangements,
Dinah every once in a while interrupting her meditations to give a poke,
or a rap on the head, to some of the young operators, with the
pudding-stick that lay by her side. In fact, Dinah ruled over the woolly
heads of the younger members with a rod of iron, and seemed to consider
them born for no earthly purpose but to "save her steps," as she phrased
it. It was the spirit of the system under which she had grown up, and
she carried it out to its full extent.

Miss Ophelia, after passing on her reformatory tour through al