Two more were sent in that day from country parishioners. Next morning, I hied me surreptitiously to the kitchen before my husband or sister was awake. I bore the steak upon a charger—_alias_, a crockery platter. It had been under lock and key until then; otherwise, its fair proportions would inevitably have been shorn. The honesty of the hired hand was an axiomatic negligible quantity; and the most faithful of family servants seldom resisted successfully the temptation to appropriate to their own use an unlawful share of eatables. They were a gluttonous race, and the tenet that “taking from marster wasn’t stealing,” stood high in their creed. I had told Emily overnight that I would show her how a steak should be cooked, and she was more than ready for me. I had never touched a bit of raw meat before, and the clamminess of the gory cut sent “creeps” all over me. It was _very_ bloody to my eyes, and I washed it well in cold water preparatory to laying it upon the broad bottom of the frying-pan, heated and buttered, which, I had learned from another of the five manuals, was “a passable substitute for a gridiron if the young housekeeper had failed to provide herself with this important utensil.” Emily had not found a gridiron in the box of kitchen utensils unpacked before my arrival, and there was no time to look it up. The steak, dripping wet, went into the broad pan set over a bed of red coals. We cooked with wood in Old Virginia. It hissed and spluttered and steamed like the escape-valve of a balky locomotive. Miss Leslie said, “Turn it at the end of eight minutes.” The sodden pallor of the exposed side did not look right to me, somehow. “Oh!” quoth Emily, “you is gwine to stew it—is you?” Pass we quickly over the abhorrent tale! The steak never attained unto the “rich brown” which, according to my cook-book makers, it should display when ready for table. I turned it four times, and, with a vague idea that butter browned more readily than meat, I added a great spoonful to the juices oozing from the steak. There was a great deal of gravy in the dish when it was served, and my companions pronounced it “extremely savory.” “But you should not have gone out into the kitchen,” demurred my husband. “Does not the cook understand her business?” “Few of her class can do without teaching,” I rejoined, valiantly.