"Minnie Eton's dyed her heavy lace curtains in coffee and has a new set made for the dining room, besides having a picture of the third boy enlarged for the parlor. She started crocheting the lace for a new bedspread for her company bedroom yesterday. And—oh, my lands, I forgot to tell you the rest of that second-hand stove business. You see Mary was feeling pretty bad about having to put up with another old stove and envying Cissie Harvey hers. Cissie's new parlor stove is a monster, made seemingly of nothing but pure nickel and isinglass. Mary went over to look at it and when she come home and took another look at her old thing she just sat down and cried. She cried till she was too tired to care and then went to Jessup's for some stove polish. On the way she met Judy Parks who told her that Dick had a new kind of polish that gave a beautiful shine without hardly any work. So Mary got that and it proved to be all Judy said it was and in no time at all Mary turned that old stove of hers into a shining glory. And just as she was standing back admiring her work in comes Cissie, wringing her hands. The baby had poked out every last one of those isinglass windows while Cissie was in the kitchen warming up his milk. And there you are. And there's people that say there is no God and no justice in this world.
"Josephine Rand's starting in on her rugs and begging rags from friends and enemies. She's going a little easy though since last week. She cut up what Ted says was a perfectly good pair of his pants. He had them hanging up in the basement and was hoping Josephine would wash and press them some day. He kept them down in the basement because he knew that if he left them in his closet she'd give them away to a hobo on account of her always feeling so sorry for tramps and believing everything they tell her. Ted says he always liked these particular pants on account of them making him look slim and being made of the same kind of cloth as his first long pair of pants that he got as a boy. So he was cherishing them and Josephine goes and cuts them into tatters. He's so mad, she says she don't dare leave a rag rug in his sight.
"Mat Wilson and his wife ain't on the very best conjugal terms either. It seems Mat has a felon right under his thumb nail, about the worst place you can have one, he thinks. It's kept him awake nights and made him miserable, so naturally he felt entitled to a good deal of sympathy. And he got it. Everybody has sympathized so much that Clara just got mad and said that that there felon of Mat's isn't half as bad as the one that she had at the end of her thumb two years ago. She says she got hollow-eyed and consumptive looking with hers but that Mat looks about the same as usual, maybe brighter. Anyhow, they've argued and scrapped about their felons so that Clara's aunt's gone off for a visit to Ioway, and Mat says that there sure is a recompense for everything in this world, even felons and domestic misery, and Clara wants to know if he's meaning to insinuate that her aunt is a nuisance, because if he is she ain't going to send his aunt the Christmas present that she's got half done for her. But Mat won't say, just keeps showing his thumb to everybody and talking about silver linings to every cloud. There's no use talking, some men are aggravating.
"Mandy Jutlins don't know whether to have the telephone put in or not. She says the Lord knows she has enough children to run all her errands and take all messages and that the two dollars a month comes in handy for a new pair of shoes. And if it's in she says more than likely she'll be wasting her time listening to a lot of silly gossip. Of course that was a foolish remark for Mandy to make, seeing all her friends have telephones. Two or three's took it personal and aren't speaking a word to Mandy but plenty about her. One of them is supposed to have said that it's a fact that Mandy doesn't need a telephone, that she talks enough without it, and that in her opinion the worst kind of a gossip is the kind that stays at home the whole enduring time, never taking pains to see how things really happen and always knowing everything.
"Emmy Smith doesn't know what to do with her oldest girl, Eleanor. Eleanor just won't wash the knives and forks and spoons. She'll scrape and scald and polish the pots and pans and does the china beautiful, but she will leave the knives and forks and even hides them away dirty. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Emmy can't explain it unless it's due to the shiftless streak in all the Smiths.
"Agnes Hooper's crab-apple jell is about all gone and here it's hardly cool yet. Those boys of hers just want to live on crab-apple jell and Aggie says she's got to the end of her strength and patience, that Charlie'd better pull up and move out among the Mormons where he could have a couple of more wives to help keep those boys filled up.
"Jennie Burton's sauerkraut isn't going to keep and hasn't turned out well, she thinks. Fremy Stockton says it's because she forgot to put in a little mite of sugar and altogether too much salt.
"Grace Cook's husband bought a whole pig from some farmer Bloomingdale way, thinking it was going to be good and cold by this time. And Grace has got up at four o'clock every morning for a week and stayed up till midnight, trying to get that pig out of sight. She's rendered lard and made sausage and salted and smoked meat till every crock is full. Yesterday she was making head cheese, sick to her stomach and crying 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.