To make housekeeping easy, it was necessary to hunt up a farmer's wife who made really good butter and would promise to deliver it weekly. This arrangement proved the solution of that difficulty. Sometimes, when the weather was cool, Dolly would take the cream-whipper, and using the sweet cream she could occasionally get for a small sum, she would turn out enough delicious unsalted butter to make the next day's meals a delight. The egg problem had to be solved in the same fashion as the butter problem. A farmer had to be found who would bring in a dozen eggs or more a week, provided he had them; too often he came supplied with only half as many as they wished to have, hens being obdurate at the time. This meant that they had then to be very economical for awhile, till the wretched fowls returned to business. Most of the groceries had to be ordered from town, for their coffee and tea must be good, and a certain number of packages of crackers and fancy biscuit, with salmon, olives, spices, chocolate, gelatine, raisins and some tins of olive oil, were ordered with them. The staples, flour, sugar, rice, salt, corn-meal and such things, they bought from day to day, as they were needed, at the local grocery. Ice continued to arrive on schedule time, but as it was almost as dear as at home, they had to use it carefully. The water was bottled and put on it in the refrigerator. Tea and coffee were treated in the same way, so that they could all be used without adding any ice from the block, except perhaps a small bit in each glass. They kept the one large piece carefully wrapped up, to prevent its melting, in defiance of the advice of most household teachers of housekeeping, who had declared that the truest economy consisted in letting the ice melt as it would, in order to best preserve the food. They found that the food still kept from day to day when the ice was wrapped, and just half as much had to be bought as when it melted at its own sweet will. When they had ice-cream they made only a small quantity at a time by having a little freezer, and breaking only as much ice as they really needed. They made more sherbets than any other frozen dainty, and for these they used fruit from the garden; raspberry, cherry and currant ices took little from the family purse. When cream was used, it was made into mousse, and of course frozen in the tireless stove. This useful article, by the way, was not brought from town, but constructed out of a wooden candy-pail with hay-filled pads; it took only a morning of the sisters' time, and no money at all to make. One warm afternoon Dolly roused herself from a reverie in the hammock and suddenly said to Mary, "This place reminds me of the seashore!" "Because it's so different, I suppose."