When the pickle bottle, the cream cheese tub or the peanut butter jar gets full, parents bring their child to the library's second floor for a ceremonial presentation on Miss Meyer's wooden desk.

Trestle-tables stood in two lines near the fires and the women worked at them cutting meat and boerwors, buttering bread, arranging platoons of pickle bottles, piling the food on trays and sweetening the evening with their voices and laughter.

"If you mean libel, I'd say so, and not talk about labels, as if Papa was a pickle bottle," advised Jo, laughing.

Presently the passage opened into a small cave, shaped like a pickle bottle, and coming to a neck at the top end.

Beginning with Gothic villas like Lyndhurst, built along the Hudson for leading New Yorkers, the Gothic imprimatur soon extended to more everyday items, including Gothic revival boot scrapers and squirrel cages, and pickle bottles stamped with pointed arches.

"Anything your little heart desires," said Biff, passing the pickle bottle.

"Bless my pickle bottle!"