owded Saturday mornings it was her custom
to step without challenge into the icy zone of the huge refrigerator,
herself pinching and tearing back the cold-storage-bitten wings of
fowls, weighing them with a fidelity to the ounce, except for a few
extra giblets (Mr. Keller loved them), hers, anyhow, most of the time,
for the asking.

Even the nearest drug store, wary of that row of the transient
hat-on-the-peg, off-the-peg, would deliver to No. 28 a mustard plaster
or a deck of cards and charge without question.

To the Jett Fish Company, "Steamers, Hotels, and Restaurants
Supplied--If It Swims We Have It," Mrs. Plush paid her bill quarterly
only, then Mr. Jett deducting the sum delicately from his board.

So it may be seen that Mrs. Plush's boarding house offered scanty palate
to the dauber in local color.

On each of the three floors was a bathroom, spotlessly clean, with a
neat hand-lettered sign over each tin tub:

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU

PLEASE WASH OUT THE TUB AFTER YOU

Upon the outstanding occasion of the fly in the soup and Mr. Keller's
subsequent deathly illness, the regrettable immersion had been directly
traceable, not to the kitchen, but to the dining-room ceiling. It was
November, a season of heavy dipterous mortality. Besides, Mrs. Peopping
had seen it fall.

Nor entered here the dirge of the soggy towel; Mrs. Plush placed fluffy
stacks of them outside each door each morning. Nor groggy coffee; Mrs.
Plush was famous for hers. Drip coffee, boiled up to an angry sea and
half an eggshell dropped in like a fairy barque, to settle it.

The Jetts, with whom we have really to do, drank two cups apiece at
breakfast. Mrs. Jett, to the slight aid and abetment of one of her two
rolls, stopped right there; Mr. Jett plunging on into choice-of--

The second roll Mrs. Jett usually carried away with her from the table.
Along about ten o'clock she was apt to feel faint rather than hungry.

"Gone," she called it. "Feeling a little gone."

Not that there was a suggestion of frailty about Mrs. Jett. Anything but
that. On the contrary, in all the eight years in the boarding house,
she held the clean record of not a day in bed, and although her history
previous to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty in
the little fancy-goods store of her own proprietorship, those years
showed her guilty of only two incapacitated days, and then because she
ran an embroidery needle