My Aunt Kezia laughed. "My dear," said she, "if you were a little older I might reason with you. But you are just at that age when girls take up with every silly notion they come across, and carry it ever so much farther, and just make regular geese of themselves. 'Tis a comfort to hope you will grow out of it. Ten years hence, if we are both alive, I shall find you making pies and cutting out bodices like other sensible women. At least I hope so." "Never!" cried Amelia. "I never could demean myself to be just an every-day creature like that!" "I am sorry for your husband," said my Aunt Kezia, bluntly, "and still more for yourself. If you set up to be an uncommon woman, the chances are that instead of rising above the common, you will just sink below it, into one of those silly things that spend their time sipping tea and flirting fans, and making men think all women foolish and unstable. And if you do that--well, all I have to say is, may God forgive you!--Cary, I want some jumballs for tea. Just go and see to them." So away I went to the kitchen, and heard no more of the talk. But what was I to do? I knew how to eat jumballs very well indeed, but how to make them I knew no more than Mr Parmenter's eyeglass. She forgets, does my Aunt Kezia, that I have lived all my life in Carlisle, where Grandmamma would as soon have thought of my building a house as making jumballs. "Maria," said I, "my Aunt Kezia has sent me to make jumballs, and I don't know how, not one bit!" "Don't you, Miss Cary?" said Maria, laughing: "well, I reckon I do. Half a pound of butter--will you weigh it yourself, Miss?--and the same of white sugar, and a pound of flour, and three ounces of almonds, and three eggs, and a little lemon peel--that's what you'll want." [Note 2.] We were going about the buttery, as she spoke, gathering up and weighing these things, and putting them together on the kitchen table. Then Maria tied a big apron on me, which she said was Fanny's, and gave me a little pan in which she bade me melt the butter. Then I had to beat the sugar into it, and then came the hard part--breaking the eggs, for only the yolks were wanted. I spoiled two, and then I said,-- "Maria, do break them for me! I shall never manage this business." "Oh yes, you will, Miss Cary, in time," says she, cheerily. "It comes hard at first, till you're used to it. Most things does. See now, you pound them almonds--I have blanched 'em--and I'll put the eggs in." So we put in the yolks of eggs, and the almonds, and the flour, and the lemon peel, till it began to smell uncommon good, and then Maria showed me how to make coiled-up snakes of it on the baking-tin, as jumballs always are: and I washed my hands, and took off Fanny's apron, and went back into the parlour. I found there all whom I had left, and Hatty and Flora as well. When tea came, and my jumballs with it, my Aunt Kezia says very calmly,--