ing
because there were still the four feet to cook up, and she said she
didn't know how to cook them and that each one looked to her about as
big as the kitchen stove.

"So I just took off my hat and put those four pig's feet on the stove
to simmer, and I helped her to get the head cheese out of the way.
When there's two working and talking, why, the time goes and when we
turned around there were those pig's feet as tender as could be, so
when the children came in we sat down and had pig's feet with
horse-radish. Grace wouldn't touch them; said she had enough pig in
her system to last her ten years and she knew she'd break out in
gumboils.

"I suppose you've heard how Malcolm Gross thought he'd lay in a nice
supply of maple syrup for his buckwheat pancakes this winter, and how
the children went to tasting and forgot to cork the big can, and the
cat went climbing around for mice and bacon rind and knocked the thing
down. Florence says there's maple syrup tracked all over the house and
she says her rugs are ruined.

"It seems as if Grove Street was full of trouble, for while Grace was
crying over her pig, Elsie Winters next door was crying over her blue
henrietta dress that didn't dye right. Elsie swears it was old dye
Martin sold her and wishes we'd have another drug store because a
little competition would do Martin good. And next door to Elsie, Pete
Sweeney's tickled to death. He says it serves Elsie right, that Green
Valley women've got a mania for dyeing things and trying to make 'em
last forever; that he's had two bolts of just the kind of color Elsie
was trying to get but that she wouldn't look at it.

"And Pete Sweeney's not the only one that's down on the women. Andy
Smiley cleaned up so much money on those new bungalows that he went to
the city and came home with twenty-five dollars' worth of ostrich
plumes for Nettie. He said he was bound that Nettie'd have a real hat
once in her life, that he's tired of watching her making her own hats,
even piecing out the shapes with bits of cardboard and trimming and
retrimming. She got in the way of it the first ten years they were
married, when Andy was having such poor luck and now, poor thing, I
guess she can't get out of it, because the day after Andy brought the
plumes Nettie went to the city and bought a thirty-nine-cent shape to
put them on. And she's wearing it like that, looking worse than ever.
They say Andy's swearing awful and that Mary Langely al