onions have it
poured over them. Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself
at the dessert; but the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the
same plague. You are ready to howl with despair, and your misery is
great upon you, especially if this is a table where you have taken
board for three months with your delicate wife and four small
children. Your case is dreadful,--and it is hopeless, because long
usage and habit have rendered your host perfectly incapable of
discovering what is the matter. "Don't like the butter, sir? I assure
you I paid an extra price for it, and it's the very best in the
market. I looked over as many as a hundred tubs, and picked out this
one." You are dumb, but not less despairing.

Yet the process of making good butter is a very simple one. To keep
the cream in a perfectly pure, cool atmosphere, to churn while it is
yet sweet, to work out the buttermilk thoroughly, and to add salt with
such discretion as not to ruin the fine, delicate flavor of the fresh
cream,--all this is quite simple, so simple that one wonders at
thousands and millions of pounds of butter yearly manufactured which
are merely a hobgoblin-bewitchment of cream into foul and loathsome
poisons.

* * * * *

The third head of my discourse is that of _Meat_, of which America
furnishes, in the gross material, enough to spread our tables royally,
were it well cared for and served.

The faults in the meat generally furnished to us are, first, that it
is too new. A beefsteak, which three or four days of keeping might
render practicable, is served up to us palpitating with freshness,
with all the toughness of animal muscle yet warm. In the Western
country, the traveler, on approaching an hotel, is often saluted by
the last shrieks of the chickens which half an hour afterward are
presented to him a la spread-eagle for his dinner. The example of the
Father of the Faithful, most wholesome to be followed in so many
respects, is imitated only in the celerity with which the young calf,
tender and good, was transformed into an edible dish for hospitable
purposes. But what might be good housekeeping in a nomadic Emir, in
days when refrigerators were yet in the future, ought not to be so
closely imitated as it often is in our own land.

In the next place, there is a woful lack of nicety in the butcher's
work of cutting and preparing meat. Who that remembers the neatly
trimmed mutton-chop of an En