"On the gallery, dear, just where mother used to keep it;" and I smiled up
at him angelically.
With a muttered something or other, poor Charlie bounded out to the back
gallery. He came back in a minute, his hands as muddy and cold as ever.
"Look here, Lulie: the water's all frozen in that confounded tin basin out
there."
"I'll have it thawed out for you," I said sweetly, rising as I spoke.
"I say, wifey"--and the great, handsome fellow came close up to me with
his mud and his burs--"do you think it's exactly fair, when a fellow's
been out all the morning shooting ducks for your dinner, to make him stand
out on the gallery such a day as this and scrub the mud off his frozen
hands?"
"That's the way mother did," was all my answer.
"Look here, Lulie, I cry quits. If you'll only let a body off this once,
you may keep house on your own plan, little lady, and I'll never tell you
how mother did it again so long as I live."
"Well, then, don't, that's a dear," I replied, "for you'll only make me
dislike her memory, without doing any good. Just be patient with me,
Charlie, and maybe after a while I'll be as good a housekeeper as your
mother was before me. The mistake you and all other men make is, in
comparing your wives at the end of their first year of housekeeping with
your mothers, whose housekeeping you knew nothing about until it was of
ever so many years' duration.
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