aleratus, a part of which she stirred into the batter.

"It's gettin' warm enough so your milk'll sour on you," said she. "This
did. Don't you know enough to use saleratus to sweeten the sour milk?
You better keep this an' buy some at the next store."

"I wish I had somebody along that could cook," said I.

"Can't you cook?" she asked. "I can."

I told her, then, all about my experience on the canal; and how we used
to carry a cook on the boat sometimes, and sometimes cooked for
ourselves. I induced her to sit by me on the spring seat which I had set
down on the ground, and join me in my meal while I told her of my
adventures. She seemed to forget her ragged and unwashed dress, while
she listened to the story of my voyages from Buffalo to Albany, and my
side trips to such places as Oswego. This canal life seemed powerfully
thrilling to the poor girl. She could only tell of living a year or so
at a time on some run-down or never run-up farm in Indiana or Illinois,
always in a log cabin in a clearing; or of her brothers and sisters who
had been "bound out" because the family was so large; and now of this
last voyage in search of an estate in Negosha.

"I can make bread," said she, after a silence. "Kin you?"

When I told her I couldn't she told me how. It was the old-fashioned
salt-rising bread, the receipt for which she gave me; and when I asked
her to write it down I found that she was even a poorer scribe than I
was. We were two mighty ignorant young folks, but we got it down, and
that night I set emptins[6] for the first time, and I kept trying, and
advising with the women-folks, until I could make as good salt-rising
bread as any one. When we had finished this her father was calling her
to come, as they were starting on toward Negosha; and I gave Rowena
money enough to buy her a calico dress pattern at the next settlement.
She tried to resist, and her eyes filled with tears as she took the
money and chokingly tried to thank me for it. She climbed into the wagon
and rode on for a while, but got out and came back to me while old Tom
went on in those mad rushes of his, and circling within a few yards of
me she said, "You're right good," and darted off over the prairie at a
wide angle to the road.

[6] Our author resists firmly all arguments in favor of the generally
accepted dictionary spelling, "emptyings." He says that the term can not
possibly come from any such idea as things which are emptied, or emptied
out