cut in quarters, a slice or two of sweet browned pork for a flavor, and a quart of rich milk, mixed with the parsnip juices into an appetizing sauce.  The after part of the dinner would be a dish of baked apples with warm gingerbread, or sometimes a deep apple pandowdy, or the baked Indian pudding that was a syrupy, fragrant concoction made of corn meal and butter and molasses baked patiently in the oven for hours.

Mother had the dishes to wash after she had tucked the Peter-bird under the afghan on the sitting room sofa for his daily nap, but there was never any grumbling in her heart over the weary days and the unaccustomed tasks; she was too busy “making things make themselves.”  If only there were a little more money!  That was her chief anxiety; for the unexpected, the outside sources of income were growing fewer, and in a year’s time the little hoard would be woefully small.  Was she doing all that she could, she wondered, as her steps flew over the Yellow House from attic to cellar.  She could play the piano and sing; she could speak three languages and read four; she had made her curtsy at two foreign courts; admiration and love had followed her ever since she could remember, and here she was, a widow at forty, living in a half-deserted New England village, making parsnip stews for her children’s dinner.  Well, it was a time of preparation, and its rigors and self-denials must be cheer fully faced.  She ought to be thankful that she was able to get a simple dinner that her children could eat; she ought to be thankful that her beef and parsnip stews and cracker puddings and corn bread were being transmuted into blood and brawn and brain-tissue, to help the world along somewhere a little later!  She ought to be grateful that it was her blessed fortune to be sending four rosy, laughing, vigorous young people down the snowy street to the white-painted academy; that it was her good luck to see four heads bending eagerly over their books around the evening lamp, and have them all turn to her for help and encouragement in the hard places.  Why should she complain, so long as the stormy petrels were all working and playing in Mother Carey’s water garden where they ought to be; gathering strength to fly over or dive under the ice-pack and climb Shiny Wall?  There is never any gate in the wall; Tom the Water Baby had found that out for himself; so it is only the plucky ones who are able to surmount the thousand difficulties they encounter on their hazardous journey to Peacepool.  How else, if they had not learned themselves, could Mother Carey’s chickens go out over the seas and show good birds the way home?  At such moments Mrs. Carey would look at her image in the glass and say, “No whimpering, madam!  You can’t have the joys of motherhood without some of its pangs!  Think of your blessings, and don’t be a coward!—­

  “Who sweeps a room as by God’s laws
   Makes that and th’ action fine.”

Then her eyes would turn from blue velvet to blue steel, and strength would flow into her from some divine, benignant source and transmute her into father as well as mother!