Hah!" I said. "We had a supersaturated solution. When it cooled off,
it coagulated."

Lottie scowled. It makes her nervous when I use big words which I only
do when I'm talking about chemistry and the like.

"Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me.

My scientific inquiring mind was stirred as I lifted the pan over to
the table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of various
cleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What would
this new combination do?

I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrot
leavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a half
inch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. "Look,
now, if you are going to start another _experiment_, dump that mess
out first and let me work on the roaster."

I saved about a cupful of the slimy gunk and she went back to her
dishes.

"You'll be sorry," I said under my breath, "if this turns out to be
the only batch of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us with
only a cupful."

A minute later, I was glad she hadn't heard me. When I dropped a
little glob of the stuff into the carrot pan and stirred it around a
bit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, the
mixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water.

"Give me a pie tin," I demanded.

Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handed
it to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made my
first important discovery.

The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots.

The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated look
and were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with my
finger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not a
droplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had poured
it out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying to
hang together.

The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. A
scrape job if I ever saw one.

* * * * *

The pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort of
rolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did.
The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled over
the surface after a last ripple.

The stuff looked like it was waiting.

The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled "wet paint," so I
s