least affect a
comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly
little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude;
that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain
health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory
on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca
Oleracea_) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give
the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray
what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary
noons, than sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled,
with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a
yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have
come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of
necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who
thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water
only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an
economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put
my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,
which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a
stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get
smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last
found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable.
In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small
loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as
an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I
ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other
noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in
cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of
bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to
the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when
from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and
refinement of this diet, and traveling gradually down in my studies
through that accidental souring of the dough, which, it is supposed,
taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations
thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff