e of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so do
the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker. Sweet
things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar is
always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our state
of health or feeling. But our taste for roast loin of mutton, high game,
salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely from time to
time, with the passing condition of our health and digestion. In
illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the distaste carried
to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in the chops of the
Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the steward who offers
you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with promises of ham
sandwiches in half a minute. Under those two painful conditions it is
the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that one can most easily
swallow--champagne, soda-water, strawberries, peaches; not lobster
salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot brandy-and-water. On
the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can
eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh salmon
three days running without inconvenience. Even a Spanish stew, with
plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive oil, tastes positively
delicious after a day's mountaineering in the Pyrenees.

The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to make
children eat fat when they don't want it. A healthy child likes fat, and
eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of disgust at
fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never
to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are bilious in
after-life just because we were compelled to eat rich food in childhood,
which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us. We might still be
indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled
whitebait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so
persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that we didn't
want and knew were indigestible.

Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few