Читать книгу The Wide, Wide World - Warner Susan - Страница 16

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For my part, he keeps me here rustically

At home, or, to speak more properly, stays

Me here at home unkept.

—As You Like It.

The next morning after breakfast Ellen found the chance she rather dreaded than wished for. Mr. Van Brunt had gone out; the old lady had not left her room, and Miss Fortune was quietly seated by the fire, busied with some mysteries of cooking. Like a true coward, Ellen could not make up her mind to bolt at once into the thick of the matter, but thought to come to it gradually—always a bad way.

"What is that, Aunt Fortune?" said she, after she had watched her with a beating heart for about five minutes.

"What is what?"

"I mean, what is that you are straining through the colander into that jar?"

"Hop-water."

"What is it for?"

"I'm scalding this meal with it to make turnpikes."

"Turnpikes!" said Ellen; "I thought turnpikes were high, smooth roads with toll-gates every now and then—that's what mamma told me they were."

"That's all the kind of turnpikes your mamma knew anything about, I reckon," said Miss Fortune, in a tone that conveyed the notion that Mrs. Montgomery's education had been very incomplete. "And indeed," she added immediately after, "if she had made more turnpikes and paid fewer tolls, it would have been just as well, I'm thinking."

Ellen felt the tone, if she did not thoroughly understand the words. She was silent a moment; then remembering her purpose, she began again. "What are these, then, Aunt Fortune?"

"Cakes, child, cakes! turnpike cakes—what I raise the bread with."

"What, those little brown cakes I have seen you melt in water and mix in the flour when you make bread?"