g into brilliant and triumphant
execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter
there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly,
through inspiration or from suggestion.... But, after all, it was in
puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those
cooks--rare as men of genius in literature--who love their own dishes;
and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of taste, and the
inherited appetites of her savage forefathers, a dominant passion for
sweets. So far as we could learn, she subsisted principally upon
puddings and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, no doubt, she
loved praise. She openly exulted in our artless flatteries of her skill;
she waited jealously at the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was
said of her work, especially if there were guests; and she was never too
weary to attempt emprises of cookery.

While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like
a turban upon her head, and about her person those mystical swathings in
which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our
sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed
and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her
stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent
odors. If we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe
from her lips, and put it behind her, with a low, mellow chuckle, and a
look of half-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her
merits took us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned
to conceal.

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking because of her
failing eyesight, and we persuaded her that spectacles would both become
and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of
steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first,
but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside
altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard
her mellow note of laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside
our door, and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles
of massive frame. We then learned that their purchase was in fulfilment
of a vow made long ago, in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever
she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the
dead were half as happy in these votive specta