But it was very seldom that there was any failure in Dinah's last
results. Though her mode of doing everything was peculiarly meandering
and circuitous, and without any sort of calculation as to time and
place,--though her kitchen generally looked as if it had been arranged
by a hurricane blowing through it, and she had about as many places for
each cooking utensil as there were days in the year,--yet, if one could
have patience to wait her own good time, up would come her dinner in
perfect order, and in a style of preparation with which an epicure could
find no fault.
It was now the season of incipient preparation for dinner. Dinah, who
required large intervals of reflection and repose, and was studious of
ease in all her arrangements, was seated on the kitchen floor, smoking a
short, stumpy pipe, to which she was much addicted, and which she always
kindled up, as a sort of censer, whenever she felt the need of an
inspiration in her arrangements. It was Dinah's mode of invoking the
domestic Muses.
Seated around her were various members of that rising race with which a
Southern household abounds, engaged in shelling peas, peeling potatoes,
picking pin-feathers out of fowls, and other preparatory arrangements,
Dinah every once in a while interrupting her meditations to give a poke,
or a rap on the head, to some of the young operators, with the
pudding-stick that lay by her side.
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