We had built a brick oven out back of the house for experimental purposes. Harold proposed that the boys bake a month's supply of bread at a time, and, when it was a day or two old, cut it all into thin slices and let it dry. These slices curled up as they dried and were known as "curled bread." A flour barrel was filled with it each month. It kept perfectly any length of time. The family voted it to be better than crackers and better than fresh breadstuff of any kind. Harold's suggestion regarding yeast cakes worked so well and was such a relief to our memories that I proposed he next attack the problem of the often forgotten salt in cooking. XX THE ELECTRIC BRICK OVEN We had no end of experiments with brick ovens. One of the most interesting was that wherein we used the brick fireplace as an oven and did the family baking in it. On a cold morning we would build up a smart wood fire in the fireplace and enjoy it during breakfast time. Then we shovelled out the coals and the ashes, and shut it up tight with a sheet iron arrangement and utilized the heat stored in the bricks for doing all sorts of cooking. Our outdoor brick oven and our monthly baking day were such a success that they led to the construction of another oven of smaller dimensions for the kitchen. This one was heated by electric lamps--one in each of the eight corners. It had double glass doors in front so that the cooking process might be watched. The glass of the inner door would be clouded with moisture for a while, when the cooking first began, but this would soon clear up, and then the lamps enabled us to watch the colour changes in baking, etc. The lamps in the upper part of the oven were connected with a different switch from those in the lower part of the oven, so that we were able to control the browning on top or bottom at pleasure. Harold introduced a device for automatically controlling the temperature of this oven. [Illustration: Fig. 177] Strips of brass and iron, _B_ and _I_ (Fig. 177), were riveted together. These were fastened in the socket _A_. They are shown edgewise in the diagram. The upper end of this compound strip is free to bend back and forth in the plane of the paper, as here represented. They normally touch the screw _C_. One of the electric light wires runs from the lamps in the oven to this screw _C_. One wire of the dynamo circuit _G_ goes to the lamps, and the other connects with _A_. Thus the compound strip acts as a switch to open and close the circuit upon the lamps.