s
occupation was great.

However, she persisted in dishing the dinner as well as cooking it,
and then sat down, bibless and apronless, to partake of it as an
illustrious guest: Mrs. Wilfer first responding to her husband's
cheerful "For what we are about to receive--" with a sepulchral Amen,
calculated to cast a damp upon the stoutest appetite.

"But what," said Bella, as she watched the carving of the fowls,
"makes them pink inside, I wonder, Pa! Is it the breed?"

"No; I don't think it's the breed, my dear," returned Pa. "I rather
think it is because they are not done."

"They ought to be," said Bella.

"Yes, I'm aware they ought to be, my dear," rejoined her father, "but
they--ain't."

So, the gridiron was put in requisition, and the good-tempered cherub,
who was often as uncherubically employed in his own family as if he
had been in the employment of some of the Old Masters, undertook to
grill the fowls. Indeed, except in respect of staring about him (a
branch of the public service to which the pictorial cherub is much
addicted), this domestic cherub discharged as many odd functions as
his prototype; with the difference, say, that he performed with a
blacking-brush on the family's boots, instead of performing on
enormous wind instruments and double-basses, and that he conducted
himself with cheerful alacrity to much useful purpose, instead of
foreshortening himself in the air with the vaguest intentions.

Bella helped him with his supplemental cookery, and made him very
happy, but put him in mortal terror too by asking him when they sat
down at table again, how he supposed they cooked fowls at the
Greenwich dinner, and whether he believed they really were such
pleasant dinners as people said? His secret winks and nods of
remonstrance, in reply, made the mischievous Bella laugh until she
choked, and then Lavinia was obliged to slap her on the back, and then
she laughed the more.

But her mother was a fine corrective at the other end of the table; to
whom her father, in the innocence of his good fellowship, at intervals
appealed with: "My dear, I am afraid you are not enjoying yourself?"

"Why so, R. W.?" she would sonorously reply.

"Because, my dear, you seem a little out of sorts."

"Not at all," would be the rejoinder, in exactly the same tone.

"Would you take a merry-thought, my dear?"

"Thank you. I will take whatever you please, R. W."

"Well, but my dear, do you like it?"

"I like it as we