“The programme of the day’s work was delightfully monotonous.  For an hour or so after breakfast we sat in the ladies’ parlor, we sewed, and we told anecdotes.  Whittier talked beautifully, almost always on the future state and his confidence in it.  Occasionally he touched upon persons.  He seems to have loved Lydia Maria Child greatly.

“When the cool of the morning was over, we went out upon the piazza, and later on we went under the trees, where, it is said, Whittier spends most of the time.

“There was little of the old-time theology in his views; his faith has been always very firm.  Mr. Cartland asked me one day if I really felt there was any doubt of the immortality of the soul.  I told him that on the whole I believed it more than I doubted it, but I could not say that I felt no doubt.  Whittier asked me if there were no immortality if I should be distressed by it, and I told him that I should be exceedingly distressed; that it was the only thing that I craved.  He said that ‘annihilation was better for the wicked than everlasting punishment,’ and to that I assented.  He said that he thought there might be persons so depraved as not to be worth saving.  I asked him if God made such.  Nobody seemed ready to reply.  Besides myself there was another of the party to whom a dying friend had promised to return, if possible, but had not come.

“Whittier believed that they did sometimes come.  He said that of all whom he had lost, no one would be so welcome to him as Lydia Maria Child.

“We held a little service in the parlor of the hotel, and Mrs. C. read the fourteenth chapter of John.  Rev. Mr. W. read a sermon from ’The pure in heart shall see God,” written by Parkhurst, of New York.  He thought the child should be told that in heaven he should have his hobby-horse.  After the service, when we talked it over, I objected to telling the child this.  Whittier did not object; he said that Luther told his little boy that he should have a little dog with a golden tail in heaven.

“Aug. 26, 1886.  I have been to see an exhibition of a cooking school.  I found sixteen girls in the basement of a school-house.  They had long tables, across which stretched a line of gas-stoves and jets of gas.  Some of the girls were using saucepans; they set them upon the stove, and then sat down where they could see a clock while the boiling process went on.

“At one table a girl was cutting out doughnuts; at another a girl was making a pudding—­a layer of bits of bread followed by a layer of fruit.  Each girl had her rolling-pin, and moulding-board or saucepan.

“The chief peculiarity of these processes was the cleanliness.  The rolling-pins were clean, the knives were clean, the aprons were clean, the hands were clean.  Not a drop was spilled, not a crumb was dropped.

“If into the kitchen of the crowded mother there could come the utensils, the commodities, the clean towels, the ample time, there would come, without the lessons, a touch of the millennium.