Mrs. Beasely was a famous cook and housekeeper. She was a very grim lady, it seemed to Janice, and the enlarged crayon portrait of Mr. Beasely, its frame draped with crape, which glared down upon the groaning table in the dining-room, almost took the girl's appetite away.
Fortunately, however, the widow insisted upon facing the portrait of her departed husband, and Janice was back to him, so she recovered her appetite. And Mrs. Beasely's "tea", or "supper" as old-fashioned folks called the meal, was worthy of a hearty appetite.
Among old-fashioned New England housekeepers a "skimpy" table—especially when a visitor is present—is an unpardonable sin. There was hot bread and cold bread, sour-milk griddle cakes, each of a delicious golden brown with crisp edges, buttered, sugared, and stacked in tempting piles; sliced cold ham and corned beef; a hot dish of smoked beef and scrambled eggs; two kinds of jelly, and three kinds of preserves; plain and frosted cake, and last of all the inevitable pie and cheese.
With all this banquet Mrs. Beasely dared raise a moist eye to the grim crayon of the departed, and observe:
"I don't know what poor Charles would say to such a smeachin' supper, if he was alive. Oh, me! it does seem as though I didn't have no heart for cookery no more since he ain't here ter sample my work. A man's a gre't spur to a woman in her housekeepin'."
"Good Land o' Goshen!" ejaculated the outspoken Mrs. Scattergood. "I count 'em a gre't nuisance. If a body didn't have no men folks to 'tend to she could live on bread an' tea—if she so liked.
"Not but what I 'preciate a good layout of vittles like this o' yourn, Miz' Beasely. But thank the good Lord! I ain't been the slave to no man's appetite for goin' on fourteen year. An' that's about all men air, come ter think on it—a pair of muddy boots an' an unquenchable appetite!"
Mrs. Beasely looked horrified, shaking her widow's cap. "Poor Charles wasn't nothin' like that," she declared, softly.
"An' I don't s'pose a worse husband ever lived in Poketown," whispered the pessimistic old lady, when the widow had gone out of the room for something. "He's been dead ten year, ain't he, 'Rill?"
"About that, mother," admitted the schoolteacher.