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.
"I am always afraid of manual-labor schools.

I am not afraid that these girls could not read, for every American girl reads, and to read is much more important than to cook; but I _am_ afraid that not all can _write_--some of them were not more than twelve years old.
"And what of the boys?
Must a common cook always be a girl?
and must a boy not cook unless on the top of the ladder, with the pay of the president of Harvard College?
"I am jealous for the schools; I have heard a gentleman who stands high in science declare that the cooking schools would eventually kill out every literary college in the land--for women.

But why not for men?
If the food for the body is more important than the food for the mind, let us destroy the latter and accept the former, but let us not continue to do what has been tried for fifteen hundred years,--to keep one half of the world to the starvation of the mind, in order to feed better the physical condition of the other half.
"Let us have cooks; but let us leave it a matter of choice, as we leave the dressmaking and the shoe-making, the millinery and the carpentry,--free to be chosen! "There are cultivated and educated women who enjoy cooking; so there are cultivated men who enjoy Kensington embroidery.

Who objects?
But take care that some rousing of the intellect comes first,--that it may be an enlightened choice,--and do not so fill the day with bread and butter and stitches that no time is left for the appreciation of Whittier, letting at least the simple songs of daily life and the influence of rhythm beautify the dreary round of the three meals a day." Miss Mitchell had a stock of conundrums on hand, and was a good guesser.
She told her stories at all times when they happened to come into her mind.

She would arrive at her sister's house, just from Poughkeepsie on a vacation, and after the threshold was crossed and she had said "Good morning," in a clear voice to be heard by all within her sight, she would, perhaps, say, "Well, I have a capital story which I must tell before I take my bonnet off, or I shall forget it!" And there went with her telling an action, voice, and manner which added greater point to the story, but which cannot be described.