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166
The Keeper of the Bees

thing for me from the interior out, that medicines and boiling springs have not accomplished.”

“It’s a queer thing,” said Margaret Cameron, “but there may be something in it. There’s a housekeeping magazine I take that has a health department in it that I have been reading for several years, and in the last year or two they have been stressing nothing in all the world but just the thing you have hit on. Just tomatoes. I didn’t think I’d ever pay much attention to what the little Scout would call ‘bunk’ about vitamines and calories and the like, but the other day something funny happened to me. I went down to the city to do some shcpping and to have a visit with a niece of mine who teaches in the schools there and she took me to lunch in a lovely big room in one of those enormous department stores. At a table right adjoining us there sat a woman whose name Molly whispered tomeacross the table, and I remembered that wherever English is spoken all over the world her songs are sung. She had a noble face, a kindly face, an intelligent face. I couldn’t keep my eyes from the efficiency of her hands, and the beauty and individuality of her clothes. With her therewas a little dumpling of a girl. You couldn’t imagine anything healthier; you couldn’t imagine anything prettier or more appealing. At one timewhen I was feasting myeyes on the child,because she reminded me so ofmy own girl when she was a little roly poly thing like that, just when I was looking straight at her, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth and her