the rest of the doughnuts to a poor man who came and
said he was starving. "Thank you, marm," said he, with his heart full
of gratitude and his mouth full of doughnuts; "I ha' n't had anything
as good as this since I left Connecticut twenty years ago."

That little subtlety consoled Em, but still she found it hard to bear
up under her apparent inability to do her duty by Lute's critical
palate. Once when Lute brought Col. Hi Thomas home to dinner they had
chicken pie. The colonel praised it and passed his plate a third time.

"Oh, but you ought to eat some of mother's chicken pie," said Lute.
"Mother never puts an under crust in her chicken pies, and that makes
'em juicier."

Same way when they had fried pork and potatoes; Lute could not
understand why the flesh of the wallowing, carnivorous western hog
should n't be as white and firm and sweet as the meat of the swill-fed
Yankee pig. And why were the Hubbard squashes so tasteless and why was
maple syrup so very different? Yes, amid all his professional duties
Lute found time to note and remark upon this and other similar things,
and of course Em was--by implication, at least--held responsible for
them all.

And Em did try so hard, so very hard, to correct the evils and to
answer the hypercritical demands of Lute's foolishly petted and spoiled
appetite. She warred valorously with butchers, grocers, and hucksters;
she sent down east to Mother Baker for all the famous family recipes;
she wrestled in speech and in practice with that awful Hulda; she
experimented long and patiently; she blistered her pretty face and
burned her little hands over that kitchen range--yes, a slow, constant
martyrdom that conscientious wife willingly endured for years in her
enthusiastic determination to do her duty by Lute. Doughnuts,
chicken-pies, boiled dinners, layer-cakes, soda biscuits, flapjacks,
fish balls, baked beans, squash pies, corned-beef hash, dried-apple
sauce, currant wine, succotash, brown bread--how valorously Em toiled
over them, only to be rewarded with some cruel reminder of how "mother"
used to do these things! It was terrible; a tedious martyrdom.

Lute--mind you--Lute was not wilfully cruel; no, he was simply and
irremediably a heedless idiot of a man, just as every married man is,
for a spell, at least. But it broke Em's heart, all the same.

Lute's mother came to visit them when their first child was born, and
she lifted a great deal of trouble off the