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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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it; and it was the fault, undeniably, of fifty other people, whom Dinah berated with unsparing zeal. But it was very seldom that there was any failure in Dinah’s last results. Though her mode of doing everything was peculiarly meandering and circuitous, and without any sort of calculation as to time and place,- though her kitchen gen- erally looked as if it had been arranged by a hurricane blowing through it, and she had about as many places for each cooking utensil as there were days in the year,- yet, if one would have patience to wait her own good time, up would come her dinner in perfect order, and in a style of preparation with which an epicure could find no fault. It was now the season of incipient preparation for dinner. Dinah, who required large intervals of reflection and repose, and was studious of ease in all her ar- rangements, was seated on the kitchen floor, smoking a short, stumpy pipe, to which she was much addicted, and which she always kindled up, as a sort of cen- ser whenever she felt the need of an inspiration in her arrangements. It was Di- nah’s mode of invoking the domestic Muses. Seated around her were various members of that rising race with which a Southern household abounds, engaged in shelling peas, peeling potatoes, picking pin-feathers out of fowls, and other preparatory arrangements,- Dinah every once in a while interrupting her meditations to give a poke, or a rap on the head, to some of the young operators, with the pudding-stick that lay by her side. In fact, Dinah ruled over the woolly heads of the younger members with a rod of iron, |
