She began on the way our pioneer mothers had to contrive to keep larders
stocked and good things ready for the households, and she tickled the
palate of every man present by mentioning every achievement in a
culinary way that every woman of his household had made in all the
generations that had gone over Harpeth Valley. She called all the
concoctions by their right names, too, and she always gave the name of
the originator, who was some dear old lady that was sleeping in the
Greenwood at the foot of the hill, or in some grave over at Providence
or Hillsboro or Bolivar, and who was grandmother or great-grandmother to
a hundred or more of the guests. I had wondered why Jane had been poring
over that old autograph manuscript receipt book in my desk for days, and
as she paid these modern resurrecting compliments to the long gone
cooks, tears and laughed literally deluged the table.
And as she built up, achievement by achievement, the domestic
woman-history of the valley, Jane showed in the most insidious way
possible how the pioneer women had been really the warp on which had
been woven the woof of the whole history of their part of the Nation,
political, financial, and religious. I never heard anything like it in
all my life, and as I looked down those long tables at those aroused,
tense, farmer faces, I knew Jane had cracked the geological crust of the
Harpeth Valley, and built a brake that would stop any whirlwind on the
woman-question that might attempt to come in on us over the Ridge from
the outside world.
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