to plates piled high with slices of brown and white bread, to dishes of eggs or picked-up cod fish, or beans warmed over in the pot, with baked potatoes sometimes, and sometimes milk toast, or Nancy’s famous corn muffins, no family of young bears ever displayed such appetites!  On Saturday mornings there were griddle cakes and maple syrup from their own trees; for Osh Popham had shown them in the spring how to tap their maples, and collect the great pails of sap to boil down into syrup.  Mother Carey and Peter made the beds after the departure of the others for school, and it was pretty to see the sturdy Peter-bird, sometimes in his coat and mittens, standing on the easiest side of the beds and helping his mother to spread the blankets and comforters smooth.  His fat legs carried him up and downstairs a dozen times on errands, while his sweet piping voice was lifted in a never ending stream of genial conversation, as he told his mother what he had just done, what he was doing at the present moment, how he was doing it, and what he proposed to do in a minute or two.  Then there was a lull from half past ten to half past eleven, shortened sometimes on baking days, when the Peter-bird had his lessons.  The old-fashioned kitchen was clean and shining by that time.  The stove glistened and the fire snapped and crackled.  The sun beamed in at the sink window, doing all he could for the climate in the few hours he was permitted to be on duty in a short New England winter day.  Peter sat on a cricket beside his mother’s chair and clasped his “Reading without Tears” earnestly and rigidly, believing it to be the key to the universe.  Oh! what an hour of happiness to Mother Carey when the boy would lift the very copy of his father’s face to her own; when the well-remembered smile and the dear twinkle of the eyes in Peter’s face would give her heart a stab of pain that was half joy after all, it was so full to the brim of sweet memories.  In that warm still hour, when she was filling the Peter-bird’s mind and soul with heavenly learning, how much she learned herself!  Love poured from her, through voice and lips and eyes, and in return she drank it in thirstily from the little creature who sat there at her knee, a twig growing just as her bending hand inclined it; all the buds of his nature opening out in the mother-sunshine that surrounded him.  Eleven thirty came all too soon.  Then before long the kettle would begin to sing, the potatoes to bubble in the saucepan, and Mother Carey’s spoon to stir the good things that had long been sizzling quietly in an iron pot.  Sometimes it was bits of beef, sometimes mutton, but the result was mostly a toothsome mixture of turnips and carrots and onions in a sea of delicious gravy, with surprises of meat here and there to vary any possible monotony.  Once or twice a week dumplings appeared, giving an air of excitement to the meal, and there was a delectable “poor man’s stew” learned from Mrs. Popham; the ingredients being strips of parsnip, potatoes