The little girls look as if they could hardly believe this, so Jeanie pulls mamma’s arm and asks, “Didn’t I catch two fish last summer?”
“Indeed she did,” says Dick, before mamma has time to answer. “She caught two sun-fish. I never saw any one do it better. Mother fried ’em for her dinner, too.”
“My sister goes to a cooking school and learns to bake fish,” says Edith, “and she is teaching me at home. I know the verse about cooking fish.”
We all begged Edith to say the verse, so, after a little coaxing, she repeated:
“Our lesson is fish, and in every dish
We would like to meet our teacher’s wish.
But many men have many minds,
There are many fishes of many kinds;
So we only learn to boil and bake,
To broil and fry, and make a fish-cake.
And trust this knowledge will carry us through
When other fishes we have to ‘do.’”
Edith is a little orphan girl who lives with her grandmother and sister Minnie. We are all so interested about the cooking class, that she tells us about how they learn to bake bread.
“I mixed the bread last Friday night and made some biscuit in the morning, and if I hadn’t forgotten the salt they would have been splendid. I don’t remember all the verses about bread, but one verse is:
“‘Now you place it in the bread bowl,
A smooth and nice dough ball,
Last, a towel and a cover,
And at night that’s all.
But when morning calls the sleeper
From her little bed,
She can make our breakfast biscuit
From that batch of bread.’”
“Well, it’s girls’ work to cook and boys’ work to catch,” said Al, who was getting tired of hearing verses.
“Jeanie did some catching before she was five years old, and you forget how nicely papa cooked the breakfast when you were camping out last summer.”