-spiders, forming thin sheets, and baked
yellow-brown in a hot oven. To make these pones into "Johnny-reb toast,"
they were basted while still hot with butter, then moistened plentifully
with Jersey milk which was half cream, allowed to stand five minutes,
then served still warm.

The recipe, I may add, came from Virginia in 1862, being brought home to
Maine by one of my uncles, who lived for a time in an Old Dominion
family, despite all the asperities of the War. From the same sunny
homeland of historic Presidents we obtained the recipe for a
marvellously good spider-cake, but that came later, as I shall relate in
due course.

As a hungry boy I used sometimes to think that pones and "Johnny-reb
toast" were pretty nearly worth the War to us!

Yet neither of these ever came quite up to "mug-bread"--the best flour
bread ever made, I still verily believe.

But the making and the baking of it are not easy, and a failure with
mug-bread is something awful!

The reader may not know it as mug-bread, for that was a local name,
confined largely to our own Maine homestead and vicinity. It has been
called milk-yeast bread, patent bread, milk-emptyings bread and
salt-rising bread; and it has also been stigmatized by several
opprobrious and offensive epithets, bestowed, I am told, by irate
housewives who lacked the skill and genius to make it.

We named it "mug-bread" because Gram always started it in an old
porcelain mug; a tall, white, lavender-and-gold banded mug, that held
more than a quart, but was sadly cracked, and, for safety's sake, was
wound just above the handle with fine white silk cord.

That mug was sixty-eight years old, and that silk cord had been on it
since 1842. Its familiar kitchen name was "Old Hannah." I suspect that
the interstices of this ancient silk string were the lurking-places of
that delightful yeast microbe that gave the flavor to the bread. For
there was rarely a failure when that mug was used.

About once in four days, generally at night, Gram would take two
tablespoonfuls of corn-meal, ten of boiled milk, and half a teaspoonful
of salt, mix them well in that mug, and set it on the low mantel-shelf,
behind the kitchen stove funnel, where it would keep uniformly warm
overnight. She covered in the top of the mug with an old tin coffee-pot
lid, which just fitted it.

When we saw "Old Hannah" go up there, we knew that some mug-bread was
incubating, and, if all worked well, would be due the foll