Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

as a hollow mockery. A celebrated judge left upon record the saying: “No man should be hanged for a murder committed before breakfast.” Another, almost as famous, openly and officially declared his unwillingness to condemn a prisoner convicted of manslaughter of whom his physician had testified that he was a chronic dyspeptic. “A dyspeptic,” urged the judge, whose own diet had consisted of mush and milk for ten years, “is never quite sane.” Not one of his three daily meals is “comfortable” to him whose alimentary apparatus is out of order. To one in tolerable health the business of “stoking” the engine for the drive of the forenoon should not be irksome. Thus common sense and hygienic general principles. Now for facts. A brilliant woman summed up the popular judgment on the subject in an after-luncheon speech before other literary women, in the assertion that “the human machine needs to be wound up and lubricated and regulated by bath and breakfast before it is fit to work with other machines, or, indeed, to go at all. Breakfast, partaken of in the company of one’s nearest and dearest, is a blunder of modern civilization. It is an ordeal over which each should mourn apart.” A young man of education and breeding, who lives in bachelor chambers with three other “good fellows,” confesses that, while the seven o’clock dinner hour is always full of cheer and good-will, the four friends seldom exchange a syllable at the breakfast table beyond a brief salutation at entering the room, and a curt “good day,” in separating to their various places of business. “Thanks to this sensible silence, we have lived together three years without quarreling,” he wound up the story by saying. “Every man is a brute until he has had his morning coffee.” Much of this is talk for talk’s sake, and some of it is Temper. It is not easy for one to get full command of oneself before the relaxed nerves are braced by tea or coffee, and the long-empty stomach is brought up to concert pitch by food. If we have