f lots more than he can possibly eat;
I've found it, time and again, laid up out in the wood-shed; and once I
found eight of my doughnuts hid in a hole in the garden wall. He thought
that he could eat the whole panful, but found that he couldn't."

"Oh, that was only laying up a store against days of famine," said Tom,
calmly. "Some days the pantry is awfully bare; and Kate, too, has a
caper of hiding the victuals. I call that a plaguey mean trick--when a
fellow's hungry! I clear the pan when I do find it, to get square with
her."

"Well," Addison remarked, "the girls have presented their side of the
work pretty strongly; but I rather guess the boys could say something on
their side;--how they have to work in the hot sun, all day long, to
plough and harrow and sow and plant and hoe the crops, to get the bread
stuff to cook into food. The girls want cooked victuals, too, as well as
we. The hot, hard work isn't all on one side."

"That's so!" echoed Tom and Halse, fervently.

"I often come in tired, hot and sweaty after a drink of water, in the
sweltering summer afternoons, and find our girls in the cool
sitting-room, rocking by the windows, looking as comfortable as you
please, reading novels," continued Addison.

"That's so!" we boys exclaimed.

"Not that I grudge them their comfort," Addison went on, laughing. "I
don't. I like to see them comfortable. Besides girls ought not to work
so hard and long as boys; they are not so strong, nor so well able to
work in the heat. But I think that a great deal of the hardship that
Kate and Doad and Nell complain of, about cooking over the hot stove, is
due to a bad method which all the women hereabouts seem to follow. They
cook twice every day. Fact, they seem to be cooking all the time. They
all do their cooking in stoves, with small ovens that will not hold more
than three or four pies, or a couple of loaves of bread at once. By the
next day they have to bake again, and so on. In summer, particularly,
their faces are red from bending over the hot stove about half the
time."

"But what would you do, Addison?" asked Theodora.

"I'll tell you what I would do," replied Addison. "I would do just what
I suggested to Gram last spring. The old lady was getting down to peep
into the stove oven and hopping up again about every two minutes. She
looked tired and her face was as red as a peony. 'Gram,' said I, 'I'll
tell you what I'll do, if you want me to. I'll take the oxen and ca