"Flour!" said the wheat--which was wheat no longer. "Now I am flour, and I am finer than ever. How white I am! I really would rather be white than green or gold colour. I wonder where the learned grain is, and if it is as fine and white as I am?" But the learned grain and her family had been laid away in the granary for seed wheat. Before the waggon reached the house again, the two boys were fast asleep in the bottom of it, and had to be helped out just as the sack was, and carried in. The sack was taken into the kitchen at once and opened, and even in its wheat days the flour had never been so proud as it was when it heard the farmer's wife say-- "I'm going to make this into cake." "Ah!" it said; "I thought so. Now I shall be rich, and admired by everybody." The farmer's wife then took some of it out in a large white bowl, and after that she busied herself beating eggs and sugar and butter all together in another bowl: and after a while she took the flour and beat it in also. "Now I am in grand company," said the flour. "The eggs and butter are the colour of gold, the sugar is like silver or diamonds. This is the very society for me." "The cake looks rich," said one of the daughters. "It's rather too rich for them children," said her mother. "But Lawsey, I dunno, neither. Nothin' don't hurt 'em. I reckon they could eat a panel of rail fence and come to no harm." "I'm rich," said the flour to itself. "That is just what I intended from the first. I am rich and I am a cake." Just then, a pair of big brown eyes came and peeped into it. They belonged to a round little head with a mass of tangled curls all over it--they belonged to Vivian. "What's that?" he asked. "Cake." "Who made it?" "I did." "I like you," said Vivian. "You're such a nice woman. Who's going to eat any of it? Is Lionel?" "I'm afraid it's too rich for boys," said the woman, but she laughed and kissed him. "No," said Vivian. "I'm afraid it isn't." "I shall be much too rich," said the cake, angrily. "Boys, indeed. I was made for something better than boys." After that, it was poured into a cake-mould, and put into the oven, where it had rather an unpleasant time of it. It was so hot in there that if the farmer's wife had not watched it carefully, it would have been burned. "But I am cake," it said, "and of the richest kind, so I can bear it, even if it is uncomfortable." When it was taken out, it really was cake, and it felt as if it was quite satisfied. Everyone who came into the kitchen and saw it, said-- "Oh, what a nice cake! How well your new flour has done!" But just once, while it was cooling, it had a curious, disagreeable feeling. It found, all at once, that the two boys, Lionel and Vivian, had come quietly into the kitchen and stood near the table, looking at the cake with their great eyes wide open and their little red mouths open, too.