e Trust or who will,
roast my coffee. Roasting is parlous work, hot, tedious, and tiresome,
also mighty apt to result in scorching if not burning. One last
caution--never meddle with the salt unless sure your hand is light, your
memory so trustworthy you will not put it in twice.

Chocolate spells milk, and cream, and trouble, hence I make it only on
occasions of high state. Yet--I am said to make it well. Perhaps the
secret lies in the brandy--a scant teaspoonful for each cake of
chocolate grated. Put in a bowl after grating, add the brandy, stir
about, then add enough hot water to dissolve smoothly, and stir into a
quart of rich milk, just brought to a boil. Add six lumps of sugar, stir
till dissolved, pour into your pot, which must have held boiling water
for five minutes previously, and serve in heated cups, with or without
whipped cream on top. There is no taste of the brandy--it appears merely
to give a smoothness to the blending. If the chocolate is too rich,
half-fill cups with boiling water, then pour in the chocolate. There are
brands of chocolate which can be made wholly of water--they will serve
at a pinch, but are not to be named with the real thing. Cocoa I have
never made, therefore say nothing about its making. Like Harry Percy's
wife, in cooking at least, I "never tell that which I do not know."

[Illustration: _When the Orchards "Hit"_]

When the peach orchard "hit" it meant joy to the plantation. Peaches had
so many charms--and there were so many ways of stretching the charms on
through winter scarcity. Peach drying was in a sort, a festival,
especially if there were a kiln, which made one independent of the
weather. It took many hands wielding many sharp knives in fair fruit to
keep a kiln of fair size running regularly. This though it were no more
than a thing of flat stones and clean clay mud, with paper laid over the
mud, and renewed periodically. There was a shed roof, over the kiln,
which sat commonly in the edge of the orchard. Black Daddy tended the
firing--with a couple of active lads to cut and fetch wood, what time
they were not fetching in great baskets of peaches.

Yellow peaches, not too ripe but full flavored, made the lightest and
sweetest dried fruit. And clingstones were ever so much better for
drying than the clear-seed sorts. Some folk took off the peach fuzz with
lye--they did not, I think, save trouble thereby, and certainly lost
somewhat in the flavor of their fruit.