In the kitchen wing of the old-fashioned brown house an old man was
just beginning to get supper, a choleric old man, if one could judge by
the bushy fierceness of the shaggy eyebrows above the sharp blue eyes,
and the aggressive slant of the gray chin whisker. Mr. Lemuel Perkins
had come in rather late from a particularly heated meeting of the
village debating society, in grocery store assembled, and you will have
to admit that it is not a soothing experience for a hungry man to find
the kitchen in dire confusion, the fire in the cook stove nothing but a
mass of embers, and not a sign of supper in sight unless the attenuated
remains of a solitary dinner answer that description.
[Illustration: “How do you do! Does my uncle, Mr. Lemuel Perkins, live
here?”]
A fire was blazing in the stove now, however; and, girdled in a blue
gingham apron, Mr. Perkins was adding to the general confusion on
the kitchen table by trying to “stir up” something for supper, with
the aid of a “ring-streaked and spotted” recipe book. Intent upon
discovering whether a certain eleven was really eleven or only a one
and a fly speck, Mr. Perkins totally disregarded the sound of “some one
gently tapping, tapping” at his kitchen door, and did not even realize
that it had been pushed open till a brisk young voice inquired:
“How do you do! Does my uncle, Mr. Lemuel Perkins, live here?”
“Huh?” demanded Mr. Perkins, whirling about, recipe book in hand, and
eyeing the intruder fiercely.
But fierce looks can find no entrance through a pair of rose-colored
spectacles that are radiating sunshine and goodwill as hard as ever
they can.
“Oh, you are Uncle Lemuel!” cried a happy little voice, while its owner
rushed headlong across the kitchen with outstretched arms. “I’m so glad
to see you.” With a gay little spring she planted a kiss on the tip of
the bristling chin whisker. “I’m your grandniece, Mary, and I’ve come
to spend Christmas with you for a surprise. Have you had scarlet fever?”
“Huh?” inquired Mr. Perkins again, a trifle less fierce, but much more
bewildered.
“Scarlet fever?” shrieked Mary, deciding at once that of course a
proper great-uncle would be deaf. “Have—you—had—scarlet fever?
I’ve—been exposed!”
“For the land sakes, little gal, quit your yellin’! I ain’t deef,”
retorted Mr. Perkins. “Who’d you say you was?”
“Mary, your niece; but I’m not a little girl. I’m thirteen and a half.
Mother says I’m a real little woman.”
“She does, does she? Waal, we’ll see which on us is right about it. Is
there one cup of flour in pancakes, or eleven? This blamed receipt book
is so messed up I can’t tell.”
“Oh, are you making pancakes?” returned his guest joyfully. “I’m so
glad. I was afraid you’d be through supper, and I’m almost starved. You
wouldn’t let me make the pancakes, would you, Uncle Lemuel? India’s not
a very suitable place for them, mother says, so we never had them much,
but she let me make them once or twice, and I just love to hear them
go splash on the griddle, and then bob up like a rubber ball, and then
flop them over, all brown and lovely. It’s such fun! But probably you
love to make them, too. I oughtn’t to ask the first night, I suppose.”
Uncle Lemuel’s visage, being trained to express habitual displeasure,
had no difficulty in concealing the feelings of joy that coursed
through him at these words. As he himself would have expressed it, he
“hated like dumb p’ison to cook a meal of vittles,” but it was against
Uncle Lemuel’s principles to display satisfaction with the happenings
of the world about him.
“Well,” he responded slowly, “if you’re so set on it, I s’pose you
might as well. Only don’t be wasteful now, and stir up a mess we can’t
eat.”
He handed over the recipe book with a grudging air that would have
deceived the very elect.
“I won’t,” promised his guest happily, whisking off her coat with one
hand and her hat with the other, and finally finding a satisfactory
place for them on a remote rocking-chair covered with red calico. “What
fun, starting in housekeeping with you right away like this! And such
a grand fire! Will you set the table, and have you got some real maple
sirup? I don’t think they have at school, but mother said you and
Aunt Nancy got it right from your own trees. Do you keep them in the
back yard, and go out, and draw some when you want it, as if you were
milking a cow?”
She was diving into her russet leather handbag as she spoke, and
presently she pulled out a blue gingham apron with triumphant glee.
“Here’s my big kitchen apron. Isn’t it the luckiest thing that I
brought it in my handbag? I didn’t have a chance to wear it at school,
so I left it out of my trunk, and then I ran across it at the last
minute, and tucked it in here. Everything does turn out so grandly!
Why, see, our aprons match! How funny! We’re twins, aren’t we? Will you
button me up in the back, please, and then I’ll tie yours again. Yours
is slipping off.”
In another moment the dazed Mr. Perkins found himself fumbling with the
buttons on a small blue gingham back; and then, before he could even
think of the first letter of Jack Robinson’s name, a capable hand had
tightened his own apron strings, and transported by two active little
feet was marshalling the various “ingrejunts” that he had already
gathered together on the kitchen table.
Muttering something about maple sirup, he retreated to the cellar to
collect his wits, though he knew full well that the sirup can, since
time immemorial, had occupied the right-hand end of the top “butt’ry”
shelf.
By the time he returned the culinary operations had been transferred to
the sink bench, and the kitchen table was laid for two. On the stove a
shining griddle was smoking in anticipation, while the little cook was
giving a last anxious whip to the batter.
“I couldn’t find the napkins, Uncle Lemuel,” she called, as the
cellarway door opened. “Will you get them out, please, and put the
butter and sirup on the table? Oh, I do _pray_ these cakes will be
good! It’s such a responsibility to cook for a grown-up man!”
A silence, heavy with the deepest anxiety, settled almost visibly over
the Perkins kitchen from the first slap of the batter upon the smoking
griddle, till three cakes had been duly “flopped” by the little cook’s
careful hand. These, however, presented to view such beautiful, round,
creamy countenances, almost obscured by very becoming brown lace veils,
that two huge sighs of relief exhaled together; one of which was
speedily transformed into a dry little cough, while Uncle Lemuel turned
and tiptoed away in search of the tea caddy and the old brown pot.
“As soon as we get six, we can sit down and begin,” called Mary
excitedly. “The stove’s so handy I can cook and eat, too. That’s such
a nice thing about eating in the kitchen. We could never do that in
India, there were always too many servants around, though mother tried
to keep it as much like an American home as she could. That’s why she
taught me to cook—so we could have American dishes.”
“Can you make pie?” queried Uncle Lemuel, through a mouthful so
dripping with maple sirup that even his tones seemed sweetened.
“No, I can’t,” admitted Mary regretfully. “Father didn’t think pie was
good for us, so mother never tried to manage that.”
All traces of sirup departed abruptly from Uncle Lemuel’s tones.
“Good for ye?” he growled. “Well, if that ain’t just like some folkses
impudence! Good for ye? Humph! Mebbe if I hadn’t et it three times a
day I mightn’t have had no more sprawl than to go out to Injy and lay
round under a green cotton umbrell’ with a black feller fannin’ the
flies off of me. Why, it’s eatin’ pie reg’lar that’s put the United
States ahead of all the other nations of the world! It’s the bulwark of
the American Constitution, pie is.”
Mary gazed at him with wide and interested eyes. Her mental picture
of her own overworked father was so many leagues away from the vision
under the green cotton umbrella that, far from resenting Uncle Lemuel’s
thrust, she never even recognized it.
“Do you think maybe that’s the matter with our constitutions?” she
inquired eagerly. “I had to come over to school because I wasn’t well,
and father isn’t a bit strong, either. Mother thought it was the
climate.”
Uncle Lem’s growl struggled through another mouthful of sirup.
“Climate! Huh! A man that eats strengthenin’ food enough can stand up
against any climate the Almighty ever made. I’ve felt sorter pindlin’
myself since I hain’t had my pie reg’lar, an’ the climate or Oatka
Centre is the same as ever, hain’t it?”
Even the intellect of a missionary as old as thirteen and a half is
forced to bow before such logic as that.
“Then I must learn how to make pie straight away,” announced Mary
solemnly. “Could you teach me, Uncle Lemuel?”
Uncle Lemuel shook his head.
“It takes womenfolks to make pies,” he admitted grudgingly. “I hain’t
had a decent pie in the house since the Widder Em left here.”
“Did she make good ones?” inquired Mary sympathetically.
Uncle Lemuel was almost torn in twain between his natural tendency
toward disparagement and the soothing effects of the innumerable
procession of well-browned griddle cakes that had come his way.
“There is folks,” he compromised, “that thinks she was a master-hand at
it. Some say the best in the village. I’ve et worse myself.”
“It’s too bad she moved away,” sighed Mary; “but I guess we can find
somebody else. Mother said the people in Oatka Centre were the kindest
in the world, and of course they’d do it for you, anyhow.”
A touch of a smile twitched at one corner of the old man’s mouth.
“Oh, yes,” he assented, with grim humour. “Any durned one of ’em would
do anythin’ under the canopy for me.”
“That’s because you’d do anything under the canopy for them,” agreed
the little girl. “Kind people always find other people kind, mother
says. I do wish I could do something for you myself, you’re such a nice
uncle, but I’m getting so sleepy I can’t think of a thing. If you’re
through, we’d better wash the dishes quickly, else I might,” she ended,
with a sleepy little giggle, “tumble—splash—into the dishpan.”