"My dear, I hate to seem unappreciative or hurt your little feelings, but the fact is, that is a most abominable way to do them, though it's common enough. It makes them greasy and streaky, partly brown and partly white. This is the really-truly way to make them: first you put them in boiling water till the skins loosen, and then drop them in cold water; slip off the skins, and dry them and mix them with the half beaten white of an egg--that is, about half the whole white; then you sprinkle them with salt and put them on a tin in the oven and occasionally stir them. They will turn a lovely creamy brown and will be crisp and evenly colored, and you can keep those you do not use at one dinner and heat them up to freshen them when you need them, for a second dinner, just as you do crackers. We will do them that way to-day. Then besides that we will get the dining-room in order, polish the silver and glass, fill the salts, and look over the china and table linen, so that to-morrow there will not be much to do." The next morning the marketing was done early, so that the things would come home in good season. At the grocery they bought the beets,--one bunch of old ones, not the young ones just in market; a can of small American peas; a head of lettuce; a square cream cheese and a round one half its size in order to have enough; a little American cheese; two lemons, and a pint of cream. At the butcher's they ordered lamb. "Not what you call 'spring lamb,'" she explained, "but exactly what you have been selling all winter; that is still nice, and plenty young enough. Now cut off the neck and the trimmings, and take out the shoulder-blade and make a pocket for the stuffing to go in comfortably, and send me a bunch of mint with it all." While she waited for her change she told Dolly about this purchase. "Forequarter of lamb is really the cheapest roast there is. Sometimes even when we are all by ourselves I buy it and make ever so many meals of it. I get a big piece, as much as eight or nine pounds, because that is the cheapest way, and the butcher keeps it for me and lets me have it as I want it. The roast makes at least two dinners, and there is a lot left over still for croquettes and soufflés and such things. Then there are four chops for one or even two dinners more for two people--" "'With a good filling soup to take off the edge of the appetite first,' otherwise the four chops would make only one dinner," interrupted Dolly, quoting freely. "Exactly. And besides, there are the trimmings and odds and ends for meat pies and stews, so you see how far it goes." "Really, I should think you and Dick would fairly bleat!"