“You, in New York, surely do not call the author of ‘Modern Painters’ and ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ a new man. My father has one of his books which must be nearly twenty years old.”
This was the longest speech Margaret had made to him, and, as he said afterward to the professor in describing its effects, it took him right off his feet. He admitted to the professor, but not to the girl, that he had never read a word of Ruskin in his life. The allusion he had made to him he had heard someone else use, and he had worked it into an article before now with telling effect. “As Mr. Ruskin says” looked well in a newspaper column, giving an air of erudition and research to it. Mr. Yates, however, was not at the present moment prepared to enter into a discussion on either the age or the merits of the English writer.
“Ah, well,” he said, “technically speaking, of course, Ruskin is not a new man. What I meant was that he is looked on—ah—in New York as—that is—you know—as comparatively new—comparatively new. But, as I was saying about bread, the old log-house era of bread, as I might call it, produced the most delicious loaf ever made in this country. It was the salt-rising kind, and was baked in a round, flat-bottomed iron kettle. Did you ever see the baking kettle of other days?”
“I think Mrs. Bartlett has one, although she never uses it now. It was placed on the hot embers, was it not?”
“Exactly,” said Yates, noting with pleasure that the girl was thawing, as he expressed it to himself. “The hot coals were drawn out and the kettle placed upon them. When the lid was in position, hot coals were put on he top of it. The bread was firm and white and sweet inside, with the most delicious golden brown crust all around. Ah, that was bread! but perhaps I appreciated it because I was always hungry in those days. Then came the alleged improvement of the tin Dutch oven. That was the second stage in the evolution of bread in this country. It also belonged to the log-house and open-fireplace era. Bread baked by direct heat from the fire and reflected heat from the polished tin. I think our present cast-iron stove arrangement is preferable to that, although not up to the old-time kettle.”
If Margaret had been a reader of the New York Argus, she would have noticed that the facts set forth by her visitor had already appeared in that paper, much elaborated, in an article entitled “Our Daily Bread.” In the pause that ensued after Yates had finished his dissertation on the staff of life the stillness was broken by a long wailing cry. It began with one continued, sustained note, and ended with a wail half a tone below the first. The girl paid no attention to it, but Yates started to his feet.
“In the name of—What’s that?”
Margaret smiled, but before she could answer the stillness was again broken by what appeared to be the more distant notes of a bugle.
“The first,” she said, “was Kitty Bartlett’s voice calling the men home from the field for dinner. Mrs. Bartlett is a very good housekeeper and is usually a few minutes ahead of the neighbors with the meals. The second was the sound of a horn farther up the road. It is what you would deplore as the age of tin applied to the dinner call, just as your tin oven supplanted the better bread maker. I like Kitty’s call much better than the tin horn. It seems to me more musical, although it appeared to startle you.”
“Oh, you can talk!” cried Yates with audacious admiration, at which the girl colored slightly and seemed to retire within herself again. “And you can make fun of people’s historical lore, too. Which do you use—the tin horn or the natural voice?”