"I can go on with the bakehouse. I know how. The men will all stay.
I spoke to them Saturday night."

Ray kept the accounts, and when Saturday night came, the first after
the misfortune fell upon them, she called all the journeymen into
the little bakery office, where she sat upon the high stool at her
father's desk. She gave each his week's wages, asking each one, as
he signed his name in receipt, to wait a minute. Then she told them
all, that she meant, if her father consented, to keep on with the
business.

"He may get well," she said. "Will you all stand by and help me?"

"'Deed and we wull," said Irish Martin, the newest, the smallest,
and the stupidest--if a quick heart and a willing will can be
stupid--of them all. Some stupidity is only brightness not properly
hitched on.

Ray found that she had to go on making brick loaves, however. She
must keep her men; she could not expect to train them all to new
ways; she must not make radical experiments in this trust-work, done
for her father, to hold things as they were for him. Brick loaves,
family loaves, rolls, brown bread, crackers, cookies, these had to
be made as the journeymen knew how; as bakers' men had made them
ever since and before Mother Goose wrote the dear old pat-a-cake
rhyme.

Ray wondered why, when everybody liked home bread and home cake,--if
they could stop to make them and knew how,--home bread and cake
could not be made in big bakehouse ovens also, and by the quantity.