Belles on their Toes

washed thoroughly, and then boiled in a tub on the kitchen stove. Some of the labels wouldn't come off, but we figured the bottles were clean on the inside.
    Sugar was added to root beer extract, which in turn was poured into a vat of simmering water. Then a little yeast was added, and the mixture poured into the bottles. After the caps were applied, the bottles were stored in the basement for a week, and then were ready to drink.
    The children thought, and so did their friends, that the root beer was the peer of any that came from the store. A new batch was made every couple of weeks, and finally a sort of assembly line technique was developed, with two children washing bottles in the basement, two boiling bottles on the stove, and two mixing the brew.
    The empty bottles were lined up around the stove, and the mixture siphoned into them through a rubber tube. We could make a couple of hundred bottles of root beer in less than forty minutes, and from that time on the basement always contained a batch that was ready to drink, and another batch that was aging.
    Fortunately, Tom liked root beer, so there was no objection from him about dirtying up his kitchen. But as the weeks passed, he said he was getting mighty tired of the same old flavor.
    The next time we made root beer, he suggested that we leave about a gallon of the mixture on the stove, so that he could change the flavor to suit his taste.
    Tom added a package of prunes, a cup of sugar, and a whole yeast cake into the brew. Then he boiled it for half an hour, before siphoning it into the remaining bottles.
    "I'm putting my name in chalk on these there bottles," he told us. "Don't nobody touch them, because I don't know how it's going to turn out. I'm going to leave them stand for six months, and see now the flavor is."
    "You're sure you're not trying to make yourself some kind of home brew?" Frank wanted to know.
    "Who, me ?" Tom asked piously. "There's a law against that, ain't there?"
    There was a law against it, all right. But after a day off in West Orange, Tom in the past had sometimes returned to the house smelling strongly of something that wasn't root beer.

    Cousin Leora wasn't really a cousin, which was something to be thankful for. Her family and Mother's had been close friends and neighbors in Oakland, and she had married and moved East about the same time that Mother had.
    She was plump, soft, bejeweled and inquisitive. None of us liked her, and Dad had despised her. He said she was a bloated drone, and that if the Bolshevists ever took over—which wouldn't surprise him—she'd be at the top of their purge list.
    Cousin Leora's husband wisely had given up the ghost within a year of their wedding day. It was an action we felt sure he never regretted, although his worldly goods had been considerable. Left a widow with a sizable fortune, which flowed through her fingers like flypaper, she lived by herself in an apartment in New York.
    Her visits to our house had become fairly frequent since Dad's death. Since she liked to quiz us about family affairs, she usually came when Mother was out of town. Invariably she arrived while we were eating supper. And, almost invariably, it would happen to be the one night of the week when we were relying on leftovers.
    Once she had written Grosie, Mother's mother in Oakland, that she doubted if we were getting enough to eat. As a result, Mother had had a series of anxious telephone calls from Grosie asking if everything was all right, and if we needed money.
    The calls had upset Mother so much that all of us tried to act particularly well-disciplined and well-fed, when Cousin Leora came to call.
    A few months after we started to make our own root beer. Cousin Leora dropped in one night just as we had sat down to the table. Tom saw her chauffeur wheel the limousine into our driveway, and rushed into the dining room to spread the alarm.
    "Everybody quiet down and behave hisself," Tom shouted. "It's the fat old snoop from New York."
    "Not," gasped Martha, clutching her head, "Cousin Leora! How could she know this is hash night?"
    "I think she likes my secret reseat," Tom said proudly. "I believe Old Snoop can smell my hash all the way acrost the Hudson."
    "Open some cans of vegetables," Martha hollered as she dashed into the front hall to hang up overcoats and to kick arctics and ice skates into a closet. "And everybody pick up his dishes and put on a Sunday tablecloth."
    Cousin Leora entered the hall without ringing