will. Such a one was Mary Magdalen. In two days she had transformed
a sooty cavern into a clean and orderly kitchen. For she was a
singing and a scourful woman, and her Sign was the speretual and the
scrubbing-brush. It is true that she put a precious old Spode
tea-pot on the stove and boiled the tea in it; that she hung her wig
and the dish-towel on the same nail; and that she immediately asked
for a white stocking foot to use as a coffee-bag.

"But don't you-all go bust no new pai'h," she advised economically.
"Ah 'd rathah make mah coffee in a ol' white stockin' foot any day,
jes' so you ain't done wo' out de toes too much."

"Sophy," said the horror-struck Alicia, "that woman must be watched
until we can buy a percolater. Suppose she's got 'a ol' white
stockin' foot' of her own!"

Despite which there never was, never will be, such another cook as
Mary Magdalen. It is true she wasn't amenable to discipline, and
reason wasn't her guiding-lamp. And nothing--not bribes, threats,
entreaties, prayers, orders, commands, moral suasion--could break
her of doing just what she wanted to do just when and how she wanted
to do it. You'd be entertaining your dearest enemies, serene in the
consciousness that your house was a credit to your good management;
and behold, Mary Magdalen in the drawing-room door, with her wig
askew and her hands rolled in her apron:

"Oh, Miss Sophy!"

"Well?" say you, resignedly, with a feigned smile; "what is it, Mary
Magdalen?"