going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.

  got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes for dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least.

The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil smell out of the pan.

"Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning soaps and stuff and let's see what we got."

Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff that most people take the advertisers' word for.

"This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?"

She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee pot. She remembered it specially.

I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained.

"What's saponify?" Lottie asked.

"That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap."

"But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?"

We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, I read some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent and a few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was in them.

In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought I was wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink while she was busy there, so I wound up with half a cup of Doozey soap flakes, filled the pan to the brim and set the concoction at the back of the drain board to do its business.

hen dinner was over, I was in the living room reading the paper when I heard Lottie muttering at the sink. Lottie doesn't usually mutter, so I went out to see what was wrong.

"Nice mess," she said and pointed at the roaster. The stuff had cooled and jelled into a half-solid condition.

"Hah!" I said. "We had a supersaturated solution. When it cooled off, it coagulated."

Lottie scowled. It makes her nervous when I use big words which I only do when I'm talking about chemistry and the like.

"Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me.

My scientific inquiring mind was stirred as I lifted the pan over to the table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of various cleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What would this new combination do?

I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrot leavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a half inch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. "Look, now, if you are going to start another experiment, dump that mess out first and let me work on the roaster."

I saved about a cupful of the slimy gunk and she went back to her dishes.

"You'll be sorry," I said under my