fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained cloths
were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would sometimes
reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed to her hardly
less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's milk; but
Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical analogies. The
cloths, as seen through the lattice-work, had a somewhat sensational
aspect; they spoke of battle and murder and sudden death, and sometimes
the policeman passing by, if he was a new one, thought for a second that
he had stumbled on a "clew."

Eliza Marshall took this risk quite willingly; the idea of buying her
jelly ready-made never crossed her mind. No; she made her own year after
year, and poured it out into her little glass tumblers, and sealed each
tumbler with a half-sheet of notepaper, and marked each sheet according
to the sort of jelly it protected--sometimes she made grape or
crab-apple, too. She doled out her products very economically during the
winter and spring. Then she would discover, about the first of June,
that she had a three months' supply still on hand. Then, during the
summer, the family would live on jelly and little else.

But she remained, year after year, the same firm, determined, peremptory
person in her kitchen; she never spared herself there, and she never
spared anybody else.

She gave no more quarter at the front of the house than at the back. To
get fresh air into her dim and time-worn parlor and to keep sun and dust
and smoke out--this was her one besetting problem. There were those windy
days at the end of autumn, after the sprinkling-carts had been withdrawn
from the boulevard; there were the days (about three hundred and
sixty-five in the year) when the smoke and cinders from the suburban