Children's poetry; Children's stories; Conduct of life -- Juvenile literature
"_He's_ not caught those," says Dick, while the girls look first at
the picture and then at the boys. "I guess that fellow standing up in
the boat is his father. The men have caught the fish and the boy takes
them to sell. Why, a fish as big as one of those fellows could pull a
boy right into the water, easy!"
"My brother Dick _knows_," whispers Jeanie, proudly. "He took me
fishing once and I caught two fish."
The little girls look as if they could hardly believe this, so Jeanie
pulls mamma's arm and asks, "Didn't I catch two fish last summer?"
"Indeed she did," says Dick, before mamma has time to answer. "She
caught two sun-fish. I never saw any one do it better. Mother fried
'em for her dinner, too."
"My sister goes to a cooking school and learns to bake fish," says
Edith, "and she is teaching me at home. I know the verse about cooking
fish."
We all begged Edith to say the verse, so, after a little coaxing, she
repeated:
"Our lesson is fish, and in every dish
We would like to meet our teacher's wish.
But many men have many minds,
There are many fishes of many kinds;
So we only learn to boil and bake,
To broil and fry, and make a fish-cake.
And trust this knowledge will carry us through
When other fishes we have to 'do.'"
Edith is a little orphan girl who lives with her grandmother and
sister Minnie. We are all so interested about the cooking class, that
she tells us about how they learn to bake bread.
"I mixed the bread last Friday night and made some biscuit in the
morning, and if I hadn't forgotten the salt they would have been
splendid. I don't remember all the verses about bread, but one verse
is:
"'Now you place it in the bread bowl,
A smooth and nice dough ball,
Last, a towel and a cover,
And at night that's all.
But when morning calls the sleeper
From her little bed,
She can make our breakfast biscuit
From that batch of bread.'"
"Well, it's girls' work to cook and boys' work to catch," said Al, who
was getting tired of hearing verses.
"Jeanie did some catching before she was five years old, and you
forget how nicely papa cooked the breakfast when you were camping out
last summer."
"I suppose his cooking, like Jeanie's fishing, was just an accident."
"No, indeed! Good cooking has to be learned," I said, "and this
picture makes me think of the first fish I had to cook, and what a
foolish girl I had."
"Oh, mamma's going to tell us a story about when she was a girl,"
Jeanie exclaims. So all take seats--Jeanie on my lap, the boys on the
two arms of my chair, and the three little sisters on chairs or
footstools.
Not about when I was a girl, but about when I was a very young wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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