beautiful places in the world, and there’s a light kitchen and you can take ‘Miss Pussy,’ you know. I’m sure you’ll like it and the work won’t be as hard as it is here and there’s lots of fresh air. And I’ll lend you books to read. If you won’t come we’ll have to give up going, as I won’t take a stranger up from the city.”

“Yas’m,” said Minerva, turning to the stove and beginning to use the brush again.

“Well, will you go, Minerva?”

“Yas’m.”

“Oh, you dear good thing,” said my wife, and I fully expected her to hug Minerva.

She came in to where I was finishing my second cup of coffee and said,

“Minerva is a jewel. She’s going up. Do you know, in some ways it’s better than if we had Mamie Logan because Minerva is a much better cook and she won’t have any beaux from the village to make a noise in the kitchen in the evening—”

“No, but you may have to import beaux from Thompson Street to solace her loneliness,” said I. “If I know the kind at all, Minerva will die one day away from New York.”

“Nonsense,” said Ethel. “She can’t help falling in love with the view from the kitchen windows. That lovely old purple Mount Nebo.”

I had my doubts of a New York born and bred colored cook falling in love with any view that did not comprehend a row of city houses somewhere in its composition, but I said nothing. The doctor had told me that Ethel absolutely needed a long rest in the “real country,” hill country preferred, and even if I had to go out and help Minerva in the kitchen I was going up.

We had spent a delightful week at Clover Lodge the year before with the Chauncey Wheelocks, but this year they were going to Europe and had proposed our renting it furnished and had promised Mamie Logan as cook. But a cordon bleu is not immune from scarlet fever, as we had found to our vexation—although I doubt if we felt it as much as Mamie did. She, by the way, had actually liked scenery and had told Mrs. Vernon that the distant old mountain peak was company for her while she was washing dishes. But a purple peak would not take the place of the yellow lights of a great city to Minerva and I looked forward to varied experiences, although I said nothing about my expectations to Ethel.

I half expected Minerva to back out when it came to going, but she did not. 

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