"I do not burden my memory with superfluities," answered Miss Norwood. "I can scarcely find room for necessaries."
"And do you rank the best way of making pies, cakes, and puddings, with necessaries or superfluities?"
"Among necessaries in household economy, certainly," answered Miss Norwood. "But Mrs. Child's 'Frugal Housewife' renders them superfluities as a part of memory's storage."
"Oh, the book costs something, you know; and if this can be saved by a little exercise of the memory, it is well, you know."
"The most capacious and retentive memory would fail to treasure up and retain all that one wishes to know of cooking and other matters," said Clarina.
"Well, then, one may copy from her book," said Mr. Eastman.
"Indeed, Mr. Eastman, to spend one's time in copying her recipes, when the work can be purchased for twenty-five cents, would be 'straining out a gnat, and swallowing a camel,'" remarked the precise and somewhat pedantic Miss Ellinor Gould Smith. "And then the peculiar disadvantages of referring to manuscript! I had my surfeit of this before the publication of her valuable work."
"Ah! it is every thing but valuable," answered Mr. Eastman. "Just think of her pounds of sugar, her two pounds of butter, her dozen eggs, and ounces of nutmegs. Depend upon it, they are not very valuable in the holes they would make in our cash-bags." He said this with precisely the air of one who imagines he has uttered a poser.
"But you forget her economical and wholesome prescriptions for disease, her directions for repairing and preserving clothing and provisions, that would be lost without them," answered Miss Smith.
"But one should always be prying into these things, and learn them for themselves," said Mr. Eastman.