"Pretty likely!" laughed Mrs. Bryan, "you're not forgetting so easily what you always liked to see. So do as your mother says, Mary Jane," she added kindly to the little girl, "and as soon as she says you may, come out through that door over there and you'll find me."
Alice dashed up the stairs, with Mary Jane close at her heels, and in a very short time they were down again with clean hands and faces and fresh frocks and hair ribbons. Out through the door they went, through the dining-room and into a great, roomy kitchen about as different from their own little apartment kitchen as one could imagine. It had a big pastry table in the middle; two huge stoves at one side and a long sink and several tables on another side. Big windows looked out on a grassy yard.
"Oh!" exclaimed Mary Jane rapturously, "I'd just love to live at your house, Mrs. Bryan. Would you let me beat eggs and fix the edges of pies and wipe dishes?"
"And the cupboards!" exclaimed Alice no less pleased, "would you look at these cupboards, Mary Jane! Wouldn't you just adore getting out sugar and spice and putting dishes away?"
"Well," replied Mrs. Bryan, half puzzled but very much pleased with their enthusiasm, "you're not much like most of the children who come here. Mostly they don't know or care what a kitchen looks like or where it is! I can't think what their mothers mean either, because a house without a kitchen is just nothing. And as for offering to help with dishes—" The good lady broke off in amazement at the unusual occurrence of two boarders offering assistance because they wanted to.
"Was this the surprise and may I look in that cupboard?" asked Alice as she spied a stack of pretty blue and white dishes—just the kind she had always wanted for her own—behind a half open cupboard door.
"Mercy no!" laughed Mrs. Bryan, "this isn't the surprise. But goodness knows you may look in any cupboard you like, dearie; I know you won't do any harm because you like things too well. The surprise is out here."
The girls followed her through a long pantry, the walls of which were covered with cupboards and shelves clear up to the high ceiling, through a summer kitchen where maids were working at preparations for supper, and out into a half dim shed, the floor of which felt soft under their feet because it was covered with thousands of tiny chips of wood, left from the chopping of wood for the big kitchen range.
"There," she said, pointing to two great tubs near the outside door, "that's what your mother and your uncles used to like to see when they used to come here. Have 'em every Saturday evening—just that many," she added as she pointed to the baskets, "and it's time they went into the pot this very minute."
"But what are they?" asked Alice while Mary Jane just stared at the queer sight.