ean,
the hands were clean. Not a drop was spilled, not a crumb was dropped.

"If into the kitchen of the crowded mother there could come the
utensils, the commodities, the clean towels, the ample _time_, there
would come, without the lessons, a touch of the millennium.

"I am always afraid of manual-labor schools. I am not afraid that these
girls could not read, for every American girl reads, and to read is much
more important than to cook; but I _am_ afraid that not all can
_write_--some of them were not more than twelve years old.

"And what of the boys? Must a common cook always be a girl? and must a
boy not cook unless on the top of the ladder, with the pay of the
president of Harvard College?

"I am jealous for the schools; I have heard a gentleman who stands high
in science declare that the cooking schools would eventually kill out
every literary college in the land--for women. But why not for men? If
the food for the body is more important than the food for the mind, let
us destroy the latter and accept the former, but let us not continue to
do what has been tried for fifteen hundred years,--to keep one half of
the world to the starvation of the mind, in order to feed better the
physical condition of the other half.

"Let us have cooks; but let us leave it a matter of choice, as we leave
the dressmaking and the shoe-making, the millinery and the
carpentry,--free to be chosen!

"There are cultivated and educated women who enjoy cooking; so there are
cultivated men who enjoy Kensington embroidery. Who objects? But take
care that some rousing of the intellect comes first,--that it may be an
enlightened choice,--and do not so fill the day with bread and butter
and stitches that no time is left for the appreciation of Whittier,
letting at least the simple songs of daily life and the influence of
rhythm beautify the dreary round of the three meals a day."

Miss Mitchell had a stock of conundrums on hand, and was a good guesser.
She told her stories at all times when they happened to come into her
mind. She would arrive at her sister's house, just from Poughkeepsie on
a vacation, and after the threshold was crossed and she had said "Good
morning," in a clear voice to be heard by all within her sight, she
would, perhaps, say, "Well, I have a capital story which I must tell
before I take my bonnet off, or I shall forget it!" And there went with
her telling an action, voice, and manner which added greater point to