'll have the low
realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and
the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head
and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see
what we _shall_ come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who
have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great
deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!"

"If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.

"Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?"

We were in the dining-room.

"This nice room!"

"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."

Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained
floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty
drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted
walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the
ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the
windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with
its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a
gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the
few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a
kitchen.

But Ruth began again.

"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down
stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and
everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never
was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It
would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the
kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."

"But the stove," said mother.

"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished
up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"

"It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being
suggestive."

"So is a piano," said the determined Barbara.

"I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly.

"Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!"

"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to
order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing
else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins
and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut
dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as
they are for other kinds of rooms that