Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/71

 family a surprise;” and I did. First, the loaves were baked, and put out on the table, where they looked as if they had just been exhumed from the ovens of Pompeii. Then, with beating heart, I placed my great venture in the oven. After twenty minutes of thrilling suspense the door was cautiously opened. The loaves seemed dried instead of baked, and were about half their original size. Just as I was debating in my mind whether it would not be nobler to burn them and thus end all, the men came in and Tom’s eye was arrested by my layout. “Hello! Look at Katharine’s geological exhibit,—four big round boulders; and what might these little jokers be? Geodes? No, they can’t be geodes; not the right color. What would you call them, Bert?”

Scrutinizing them carefully, Bert thought they “might be a sort of ammunition.”

“Not shells,” said Tom, hitting them a resounding whack with a carving-knife; “they’re too solid, and there is no fuse to ’em. Might be paper-weights.”

Wiping tears from my eyes with my pitchy fingers, hermetically sealing one, I looked up with the other and said,—

“‘You are pleased to be merry, gentlemen.’”

“Come, Bert, we’ve got to fly. When Katharine begins to talk like Shakespeare, she’s mad; but I’ll just take one of these things out to the woodhouse and bust it open and see if I can find out what it’s made of.”