Article August 22, 1936 Issue

Pans and People!

[Written Especially for Children]

JULIA M. JOHNSTON

Elizabeth was watching her father. They were in the cellar where a row of shining milk pans stood on a long bench. These were full of milk, and father was skimming off the cream from the top of each one and putting it into a pail. Father never spilled a drop, and he had promised Elizabeth that she might try this some day. She loved to see how carefully every bit of the yellow cream was saved, then how the milk was poured into a can. Then the pans were taken up into the kitchen to be washed and scrubbed until they shone.

But this particular morning something different happened. When father gathered up the pans to take them to the kitchen he turned one upside down and carefully looked over the bottom of it. When they went upstairs he said, "Come along out to the barn, daughter, and we will solder up the hole in this pan." They went to the room where the tools were kept, and father took out something that looked like a stick of silver, and holding the end of it in the flame of a candle let the melted drop cover the tiny hole in the pan. Then the pan was set up to dry.

"Darling, did you notice how very little solder it took to fill that hole and make the pan useful again? Just one drop. If I had covered the whole bottom of the pan with solder, and skipped that one little hole, the pan would have gone on leaking. But just one bit of solder right on the hole did the job."

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