We all bought the prize. It looked cumbrous, and it was expensive, but time is money, and we remembered that a large snow-custard must be beaten ninety minutes with an ordinary egg-whip, and cake-frosting, thirty. We paid, each of us, our dollar and a half, and carried home the time-and-muscle-saver in a box of its own, so big that we chose back streets in preference to fashionable promenades, on our return. Trembling with exultation, we rushed into the kitchen to display the treasure.
“Yes, mem! What might it be, mem?”
“Why, Katey! an egg-beater! and the greatest convenience ever manufactured!”
“Ah! and what a silly was meself, mem, to be thinking it was a coffee-mill, when I saw you a-screwin’ it on to the table!”
We screwed it “on to the table,” at a corner, for there was not room for it to revolve at sides and ends. Katey held a bowl with eggs in it at just the right elevation below; and by turning a crank we moved a many-cogged wheel which fitted into another wheel, which turned a whirligig at the bottom. Katey held the bowl steadily; we worked very fast at the windlass-handle, and in eight minutes the méringue was ready.
“Well done!” cried housewives, one and all. “Great is the Grand duplex back (and forward) action Invention, for the amelioration of weary-wristed womankind! To be sure, it takes two people to work it, unless one can hold the bowl firmly between the knees in just the right place, but it is undeniably a wonderful improvement.”
I, with the rest, cried, “wonderful!” even when the bowl tipped over on the kitchen-floor, with the yolks of ten eggs in it; when I broke the screw by giving it one turn too many, and was blandly assured by the artificer in metals, to whom I took it for repairs, that “them cast-iron articles can’t never be mended, ma’am, without it is by buying of a new one;” even when the cogs of the wheels became rheumatic, and hitched groaningly at every round. But when one day, in full flight through a seething heap of icing, the steel strips of the triple whirligig that did the whipping, suddenly caught, the one upon the other, and came to a dead lock; when, as I would have released them by an energetic revolution of the wheel, they tore one another out by the roots,—I arose in deadly calm; undid the screw, set the bowl on the table, straightened my cramped spine, and sent to the nearest tin-shop for a shilling whisk.
Four years ago, without prevision that one of the blessings of my life was coming upon me, I paid a visit to my “house-furnisher.” He had a new egg-beater for sale.
“Vanitas vanitatum!” said I, theatrically waving it from me, “I am cured!”
“It comes well recommended,” remarked he, quietly.