176 UNCLE TOMS CABIN; OR, |

to time and place—though her kitchen generally looked as if it
had been arranged bya 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 would 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 ad-
dicted, and which she always kindled up, as a sort of censer, when-
ever 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.
In fact, Dinah ruled over the woolly heads of the younger mem-
bers with a rod of iron, and seemed to consider them born for no
earthly purpose but to “save her steps ” as she phrased it. It
was the spirit of the system under which she had grown up, and
she carried it out to its full extent.

Miss Ophelia, after passing on her reformatory tour through all
the other parts of the establishment, now entered the kitchen.
Dinah had heard, from various sources, what was going on, and
resolved to stand on defensive and conservative ground, mentally
determined to oppose and ignore every new measure without any
actual and observable contest.

The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great
old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it—an arrange-
ment which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to
exchange for the convenience of a modern cook-stove. Not she.
No Puseyite, or conservative of any school, was ever more inflexibly
attached to time-honoured inconveniences than Dinah.

When St. Clare had first returned from the north, impressed
with the system and order of his uncle’s kitchen arrangements,
he had largely provided his own with an array of cupboards,
drawers, and various apparatus, to induco systematic regulation,
under the sanguine illusion that it would be of any possible assist-
ance to Dinah in her arrangements. He might as well have pro-
vided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers aud
closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for
the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons,
cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, wherein her
soul delighted.

When Miss Ophelia entered the kitchen, Dinah did not rise,
”

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LDS