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

and—“a MAN!” When a woman brings out the monosyllable in that accent, she may as well go a semi-tone higher and say, “Monster!” To be explicit, John must dance when his spouse puts the pipes to her lips, and not presume to mourn but at her lamenting. As her sister, my sympathies topple dangerously toward her. As an impartial chronicler I can not deny that much may be said in his defense, even when he is convicted of womanish meddling. He is but a passenger upon the domestic craft in fair weather, a paying passenger, who is expected, nevertheless, to be smilingly content with his accommodations, to eat as he is fed, sleep upon the bed as it is made, and to complain of nothing until the sea gets rough, and another and a stout hand is needed on deck and in the rigging. The principle should work well both ways, or it will go to pieces of its own weight. [Illustration] FISH FOR BREAKFAST A modern Peter Magnus, always on the alert for coincidences, once called my attention to the singular fitness of the height of the fish season and the coming of Lent. “It happens uncommonly convenient, at any rate. How very, very awkward it would be if there were no fish in the market just when the Church forbids meat!” prosed my interlocutor, whose nationality I need not specify. I might have replied, had there been any hope of his seeing the point of the story, with the anecdote of one of his countrymen who invited me to view the total eclipse of the moon through his telescope, and, while I gazed, remarked upon the happy accident that this particular eclipse “had taken place at the full of the moon.” Dame Nature adjusts kindly and cleverly all seasons and happenings to the need of her children. Fish, easily digested and rich in phosphates, are in their delicious prime as winter suddenly relaxes her hold upon our world and our systems. We needed fats to keep up animal fats in cold weather. The first warmer days ease the