“You see,” began Bess, in an explanatory voice, “Mrs. West was called to see Mrs. White, who is quite ill at Polson, and she gave me full sway in the kitchen for today. Mary, the Indian woman, is on a protracted visit to some of her relatives, over on Dayton Creek, so I am to get the meals. It’s great fun to come into the kitchen and cook ‘just for today,’ but I do not think I should care to assume the responsibility and the thinkability of twenty-one squares a week. I don’t wonder that women grow desperately tired of unceasingly hungry people to keep satisfied.”
On chatted the girl to the enthralled listener, and her composure returned.
“Were you trying to put your head in the flour barrel?” laughingly inquired Davis, as he noted the white, puffy locks.
“No,” said Bess, assuming a dramatic attitude. She quoted,
‘My hair is grey, though not with years,
Nor grew it white in a single night,
As men’s have grown from sudden—’
“Oh, say,” she cried, abruptly, “don’t you love Lord Byron’s poems! The Prisoner of Chillon, Childe Harold, Mazeppa—only that’s so cruel!
“You see this,” she changed the subject. “This which ought to be a delectation,” pointing with scornful gesture at the remnant of the burned and flattened cake before her on the table; and then, giving her latest creation another whack or two before putting it into the baking-tin, “but it is only an abstraction for which Lord Byron is to blame. I had that book of his poems open, so that I might be committing some of the lines while occupied in stirring the batter, and while I was repeating,—‘There were seven pillars of Gothic mold—seven pillars of’—why, you see, I put seven teaspoonsful of yeast powder into the stuff and never noticed it until I had opened the oven, and the frothy, foamy mass went sizz-z-z—and hit bottom.”
Davis became convulsed at her narrative and her manner of relating it.
“Now, sir; please do not move nor breathe for forty minutes, and I will show you a triumph,” commanded Bess, as she picked up the utensils which she had used in her work.
“If I may speak, ever so carefully,” said Davis, “I’d like to tell you a little experience I had with a cake, or rather, an experience of an old bachelor friend of mine, over east of the range.”