institutions to new uses. Pumpkin
pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant
pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies,
Marlborough-pudding pies--pies with top crusts and pies without--pies
adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips
laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless
fertility of the feminine mind when once let loose in a given
direction.

Fancy the heat and vigour of the great pan formation, when Aunt Lois
and Aunt Keziah, and my mother and grandmother, all in ecstasies of
creative inspiration, ran, bustled, and hurried--mixing, rolling,
tasting, consulting--alternately setting us children to work when
anything could be made of us, and then chasing us all out of the
kitchen when our misinformed childhood ventured to take too many
liberties with sacred mysteries. Then out we would all fly at the
kitchen door, like sparks from a blacksmith's window.

On these occasions, as there was a great looseness in the police
department over us children, we usually found a ready refuge at Miss
Mehitable's with Tina,[8] who, confident of the strength of her
position with Polly, invited us into the kitchen, and with the air of
a mistress led us around to view the proceedings there.

[Footnote 8: Tina was Miss Mehitable's adopted child; Polly her
faithful old maid-servant.]

A genius for entertaining was one of Tina's principal characteristics;
and she did not fail to make free with raisins, or citrons, or
whatever came to hand, in a spirit of hospitality at which Polly
seriously demurred. That worthy woman occasionally felt the
inconvenience of the state of subjugation to which the little elf had
somehow or other reduced her, and sometimes rattled her chains
fiercely, scolding with a vigour which rather alarmed us, but which
Tina minded not a whit. Confident of her own powers, she would, in the
very midst of her wrath, mimic her to her face with such irresistible
drollery as to cause the torrent of reproof to end in a dissonant
laugh, accompanied by a submissive cry for quarter.

"I declare, Tina Percival," she said to her one day, "you're saucy
enough to physic a horn bug! I never did see the beater of you! If
Miss Mehitable don't keep you in better order, I don't see what's to
become of any of us!"

"Why, what did 'come of you before I came?" was the undismayed reply.
"You know, Polly, you and Aunty both were just as lonesom