fe at Craigenputtock. Thomas could not eat bakers'
bread, so Jeannie baked. The one servant they had was not competent.
It may have been this same servant that was responsible for Thomas'
finding, altogether unexpectedly, of course, a dead mouse at the
bottom of his dish of oatmeal. As to the bread-baking Jean has given
us a very graphic account:

"Further we were very poor, and further and worst, being an only
child, and brought up to 'great prospects,' I was sublimely ignorant
of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar,
and very fair mathematician! It behooved me in these astonishing
circumstances to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore
their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons, and I was
expected 'to look to all that;' also it behooved me to learn to
_cook_! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way
place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my
difficulties dreadfully. The bread, above all, bought at Dumfries,
'soured on his stomach' (Oh heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a
Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's _Cottage
Economy_, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But knowing nothing
about the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to
pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought
to have been put into bed; and I remained the only person not asleep
in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then
two, and then three, and still I was sitting there in an immense
solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a
sense of forlornness and _degradation_. That I who had been so petted
at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, and
who had never been required to _do_ anything, but _cultivate my mind_,
should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching _a loaf
of bread_, which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts
maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud.
It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all
night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and
suddenly I asked myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers,
what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf
of bread, so that each be the thing that one's hand has found to do?'
... If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic