In this new war activity it wasn’t so much how you canned a thing as what you canned.  Genevieve May showed ’em how to make mincemeat out of tomatoes and beets; how to make marmalade out of turnips and orange peel; how to make preserves out of apple peelings and carrots; and guava jelly out of mushmelon rinds, or some such thing.  She’d go into towns and rent a storeroom and put up her canning outfit, hiring a couple of the lower classes to do the actual work, and invite women to bring in their truck of this kind and learn regular old rock-bottom economy.  They’d come, with their stuff that should of been fattening shotes, and Genevieve May would lecture on how to can it.  It looked through the glass like sure-enough human food.

Then, after she’d got ’em all taught, she’d say wouldn’t it be nice of these ladies to let her sell all this canned stuff and give the proceeds to the different war charities!  And there wasn’t a woman that didn’t consent readily, having tasted it in the cooking.  Not a one of ’em wanted to take home these delicacies.  It was right noble or cautious, or something.  And after visiting six or eight of these communities Genevieve May had quite a stock of these magic delicacies on sale in different stores and was looking forward to putting the war firmly on its feet—­only she couldn’t get many reports of sales from this stock.

Then she got a dandy idea.  She would come to the Kulanche County Fair at Red Gap, assemble all her stock there, give one of these here demonstrations in economic canning, and auction off the whole lot with a glad hurrah.  She thought mebbe, with her influence, she might get Secretary Baker, or someone like that, to come out and do the auctioning—­all under the auspices of Mrs. Genevieve May Popper, whose tireless efforts had done so much to teach the dear old Fatherland its lesson, and so on.  She now had about three hundred jars and bottles of this stuff after her summer’s work, and it looked important.

I got down to the county fair myself last year, having some sure-fire blue-ribbon stock there, and it was then that I hear G.H.  Stultz talking about this here mother-in-law of his, he taking me aside at their home one night, so his wife, Lucille, wouldn’t hear.

“This respected lady is trying to teach her grandmother how to suck eggs—­no more, no less,” he says.  “Now she’s coming here to pull something off.  You watch her—­that’s all I ask.  Everything that woman touches goes funny.  Look how she poisoned those innocent people up at that hotel.  And I’ll bet this canned stuff she’s going to sell off will kill even mere tasters.  If she only hadn’t come to my town!  That woman don’t seem to realize that I’m cursed with a German name and have to be miles above suspicion.

“Suppose she sells off this stuff!  I give you my word she puts things in it that even a professional canning factory wouldn’t dare to.  And suppose it poisons off a lot of our best patriots!  Do you think a mob will be very long blaming me for a hand in it?  Why, it’ll have me, in no time at all, reaching my feet down for something solid that has been carefully removed.”