the life of that household more difficult. In spite
of dismaying increases in wages, the Adamses still
strove to keep a cook; and, as they were unable to
pay the higher rates demanded by a good one, what
they usually had was a whimsical coloured woman
of nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a
person the old-fashioned "dinner-bell" was satisfy-
ing; life could instantly be made intolerable for any
one dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was
capable of every desirable profanity and left nothing
bottled up in the breast of the ringer. But the
chamois-covered stick might whack upon Alice's
little Chinese bowls for a considerable length of
time and produce no great effect of urgency upon a
hearer, nor any other effect, except fury in the cook.
The ironical impossibility of expressing indignation
otherwise than by sounds of gentle harmony proved
exasperating; the cook was apt to become surcharged,
so that explosive resignations, never rare, were some-
what more frequent after the introduction of the
gong.

Mrs. Adams took this increased frequency to be
only another manifestation of the inexplicable new
difficulties that beset all housekeeping. You paid
a cook double what you had paid one a few years be-

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