s own kind and way, has a merit not inferior to
that of England and France. Many prefer it, and it certainly takes a
rank equally respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and
worked so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it
might make the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but
salted with care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether
even a fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to
the white, creamy freshness of his own. Now I am not for universal
imitation of foreign customs, and where I find this butter made
perfectly I call it our American style, and am not ashamed of it. I
only regret that this article is the exception, and not the rule, on
our tables. When I reflect on the possibilities which beset the
delicate stomach in this line, I do not wonder that my venerated
friend Dr. Mussey used to close his counsels to invalids with the
direction, "And don't eat grease on your bread."

America must, I think, have the credit of manufacturing and putting
into market more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of
the world together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which
prevail in it are quite a study. This has a cheesy taste, that a
mouldy,--this is flavored with cabbage, and that again with turnip;
and another has the strong, sharp savor of rancid animal fat. These
varieties, I presume, come from the practice of churning only at long
intervals, and keeping the cream meanwhile in unventilated cellars or
dairies, the air of which is loaded with the effluvia of vegetable
substances. No domestic articles are so sympathetic as those of the
milk tribe: they readily take on the smell and taste of any
neighboring substance, and hence the infinite variety of flavors on
which one mournfully muses who has late in autumn to taste twenty
firkins of butter in hopes of finding one which will simply not be
intolerable on his winter table.

A matter for despair as regards bad butter is that, at the tables
where it is used, it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to
every other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of
bread, which fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beefsteak,
which proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge
in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and
polluting the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, in the
succotash, in the squash; the beets swim in it, the