"It's awful good--too good! It 'pears wicked to enjoy any earthly thing so much. Besides, you needn't tell me that _it_ ain't awful costly, 'cause I shan't believe it." "If my word is of so doubtful quality," said Grace, with rising color, "perhaps Mrs. Taggess, with whom you're better acquainted, will inform you." "'Tis nothing but milk, cream, and sugar," said Mrs. Taggess, who had borrowed Grace's freezer and experimented with it, "and most of you know very well that you've so much milk that you feed some of it to your pigs. The cream in what all of you have eaten would make, perhaps, a single pound of butter, which you would be glad to sell for fifteen cents. The sugar cost not more than five or six cents, and the flavoring, to any one with raspberries in their own garden, would have cost nothing." The guests gasped in chorus, but the tormentor quickly said:-- "But the ice! Us poor farmin' folks can't afford ice; it's only them that makes their livin' out of us--" "Excuse me," said Mrs. Taggess, "but many of the farmers, your husband among them, have been telling Doctor Taggess recently that they were going to put up ice-houses next winter, and that they were foolish or lazy for not having already done so before. I'm sure that all of you who have enjoyed the cream so greatly will keep your husbands in mind of it, especially as ice-cream, made at home, is as cheap as the poorest food that any farmer's family eats." The coming of the coffee caused conversation to abate once more, for in each cup floated a puff of whipped cream--a spectacle unfamiliar to any of the gossips, some of whom hastily spooned and swallowed it, in the supposition that it was ice-cream, put in to cool the coffee somewhat. Those who followed the motions of their hostess and Mrs. Taggess stirred the whipped cream into the coffee, and enjoyed the result, but again the voice of the tormentor arose:-- "We buy all our coffee at your store, but we don't never have none that tastes like this here." "Indeed?" Grace said, with an air of solicitude. "I wonder why, for there is but one kind in the store, and this was made from it. Perhaps we prepare it in different ways." "I bile mine a plumb half-hour," said the tormentor, "so's to git ev'ry mite o' stren'th out o' it." "Oh! I never boil mine." She never boiled coffee! Would the wonders of this house and its housekeeper never cease? "For pity sakes, how does any one make coffee without boilin', _I'd_ like to know?" said a little woman with a thin, aquiline nose and a piercing voice.