es, a
black gown lying over the arm of the sofa caught his eye. He was rising
to deliver his sermon, when it forced itself on his attention again.

"'Sure enough,' thought he, 'Dutch Reformed clergymen do wear gowns. I
might as well put it on.'

"So he solemnly thrust himself into the malicious (as you would say)
garment, and went through the services as well as he could, considering
that his audience seemed singularly agitated, and indeed on the point of
bursting out into a general laugh, throughout the entire service. And no
wonder! The good Doctor, in his zeal for conformity, had attired himself
in the black cambric duster in which the pulpit was shrouded during
week-days, and had been gesticulating his eloquent homily with his arms
thrust through the holes left for the pulpit-lamps!"

WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?

I think I must be personally known to most of the readers of the
"Atlantic." I see them wherever I go, and they see me. Beneath a
shelter-tent by the Rapidan, in a striped railroad-station in Bavaria,
at the counter of Truebner's bookstore in London, and at Cordaville, in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, as we waited for the freight to get out
of the way, I have read the "Atlantic" over their shoulders, or they
over mine. The same thing has happened at six hundred and thirty-two
other improbable places. More than this, however, my words and works in
the great science of Domestic Economy have travelled everywhere before
me, not simply like the Connecticut of the poet,

"Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man,"[35]

but extending all over the civilized world. Not that I am the author of
the clothes-wringing machine, or of the spring clothes-pin,--my
influence has been more subtile. I have propounded great central axioms
in housekeeping and the other economies, which have rushed over the
world with the inevitable momentum of truth. It was I, for instance, who
first discovered and proclaimed the great governing fact that the butter
of a family costs more than its bread. It was I who first announced that
you cannot economize in the quality of your paper. I am the discoverer
of the formula that a family consumes as many barrels of flour in a year
as it has adult members, reducing children to adults by the rule of
three. The morning after our marriage I raised the window-shade, so that
the rising sun of that auspicious day should shine full upon our
parlor-Brussels. I said to Lois,