Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

from sheer necessity are compelled for the greater part of the summer to be cooped up in broiling weather in a hot, close office, their day’s employment being varied but by occasional visits to hotter sale-rooms, &c., containing an atmosphere ten times more close and vitiated! The unfortunate husband returns to his home with wearied brain and jaded appetite. Too often mingled carelessness and selfishness has provided such unappetising food for his dinner, that he is fain to seek for that nourishment of which his body stands in need in fluids rather than solids, and then the seeds are sown which eventually grow up and produce a harvest of wretchedness and misery. I overheard a conversation once in a little back room in a famous pastrycook’s, now done away with, between two wives, on their husbands’ selfishness, each one of course trying to make out her own the worst. They had started with a basin of mock-turtle soup, and had followed with two oyster patties each. I left before they had finished. It was before wine was allowed to be sold by pastrycooks, or, judging from appearances, they would probably have remained there during the better part of the afternoon. It is the way of the world all over. I recollect a man about five foot three passing one who was fully five foot two and a half, and remarking:— “Dear me, what a terrible misfortune it must be to be so short!” Do you know any one who breakfasts in bed every day, who never attends at all to household duties, and whose health requires a rarer wine at dinner than others? You may be quite sure that person will be most intolerant to any approach to self-indulgence in others, and will be given to hold forth little homilies on the duties of early rising, industry, and self-denial. Charity begins at home, and those only who deny themselves can make allowances for the want of self-denial in others. Great allowance should be made for those who, after a hard day’s mental work, return home on a hot day, irritable,