“Never mind,” said Bel, putting sugar into Mary Pinfall’s second cup of coffee.  “I’ve got the notion of those lines, Kate,—­I was going to tell you,—­into my head at last, I do believe.  Red-hot iron makes a rainbow through a prism, like any light; but iron-steam stops a stripe of the color; and every burning thing does the same way,—­stops its own color when it shines through its own vapor; there!  Let’s hold on to that, and we’ll go all over it another time.  There’s a piece about it in last month’s Scribner.”

“What are you talking about?” said Elise Mokey.

“The way they’ve been finding out what the sun is made of.  By the black lines across the rainbow colors.  It’s a telegraph; they’ve just learned to read it.”

“But what do you care?”

“I guess it’s put there as much, for me as anybody,” said Bel.  “I don’t think we should ever pick up such things, though, among the basting threads at Fillmer & Bylles’.  They’re lying round here, loose; in books and talk, and everything.  They’re going to have Crambo this evening, Kate.  After these dishes are washed, I mean to try my hand at it.  They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made last time; they couldn’t quite remember it.  I’ve got it.  I picked it up among the sweepings.  I shall take it in to her by and by.”

Bel went to her work-basket as she spoke, and lifting up some calico pieces that lay upon it, drew from underneath two or three folded bits of paper.

“This is it,” she said, selecting one, and coming back and reading.

(Do you see, let me ask in a hurried parenthesis,—­how the tone of this household might easily have been a different one, and pervaded differently its auxiliary department?  How, in that case, it might have been nothing better than a surreptitious scrap of silk or velvet, that would have lain in Bel Bree’s work-basket, with a story about it of how, and for what gayety, it had been made; a scrap out of a life that these girls could only gossip and wonder about,—­not participate, and with self-same human privilege and faculty delight in; and yet the only scrap that—­“out of the sweepings”—­they could have picked up? There is where, if you know it, dear parlor people, the up-side, by just living, can so graciously and generously be always helping the down.)

Bel read:—­

“’What of that second great fire that was prophesied to come before Christmas?’—­’Peaches.’”

“You’ve got to get that word into the answer, you see and it hasn’t the very least thing to do with it!  Now see:—­

’A prophet, after the event,
No startling wisdom teaches;
A second fire would scarce be sent
To gratify the morbid bent
That for fresh horror reaches. 
But, friend, do tell me why you went
And mixed it up with peaches!’

It’s great fun!  And sometimes it’s lovely, real poetry.  Kate, you’ve got to give me some words and questions, I’m going to take to Crambo.”