ntific basis.

Such an experimental kitchen should analyze and test food products as to
best methods of preparation; it should try new utensils; it should fit
young women for their own home life. Perhaps something in this line will
grow out of the New England Kitchen, so successfully started in Boston.

To bring about such a state of things, public opinion must be educated
in every direction, through the home, school, and newspapers, as well as
by individual effort.

The newspaper's cooking, like its editorials, must not be so narrow and
partisan but that it may command the respect of those who do not wholly
agree with it.

We must strive to separate the essentials from the non-essentials in our
housekeeping; to recognize the various conditions of life among those to
whom we are writing.

We do not want to copy the food fashions of any other land in a servile
manner; no French, Italian, or English teacher can best instruct us in
methods of cooking.

But, following our national motto, let us select the best from all, and
unite these principles to develop an American system of cooking that
shall produce a race so well proportioned physically that their mental
and moral natures cannot fail to be well balanced.

_Anna Barrows._

BOSTON, Mass.

DO THE BEST WRITERS WRITE?

A few years ago my attention was attracted by an article in one of the
leading magazines. It was an article of more than ordinary merit,
possessing that rarity, even then, a plot dramatically conceived and
executed. The scene was laid in a part of the world the truthful
picturing of which showed the writer to be a person who had travelled
much and observed keenly; the diction was "English pure and undefiled."
There was but one drawback, that the author's name was withheld, and I
was obliged to lay my offering of approval and admiration at an unknown
shrine.

Lately, in conversation with a man who forms one of the great majority
of those who gain a moderate competence in business life, his days spent
in the wearisome routine of mercantile life, his nights in painful
figurings about that delusive "deal" which is to settle satisfactorily
all questions of financial perplexity, our talk turned on books,
literary celebrities, the chat of the profession of letters. My friend
suddenly became communicative and reminiscent--rare expressions in him.

"A few years ago," he said. "I, too, had the literary craze. I wrote a
little--stray articl