lightsome and buoyant. He is a great theorist and classifier. He
adheres to the ornate worship of the Mother Church when religiously
disposed. His literature is perspicuous and clear. He is an admirable
doctrinaire and generalizer,--witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts
philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The
Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is
indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German
philosophy and mysticism are its natural outcome.

Baked beans, pumpkin pie, apple-sauce, onions, codfish, and Medford
rum,--these were the staple items of the primitive New England larder;
and they were an appropriate diet whereon to nourish the caucus-loving,
inventive, acute, methodically fanatical Yankee. The bean, the most
venerable and nutritious of lentils, was anciently used as a ballot or
vote. Hence it symbolized in the old Greek democracies politics and a
public career. Hence Pythagoras and his disciples, though they were
vegetable-eaters, eschewed the bean as an article of diet, from its
association with politics, demagogism, and ochlocracy. They preferred
the life contemplative and the _fallentis semita vitae_. Hence their
utter detestation of beans, the symbols of noisy gatherings, of
demagogues and party strife and every species of political trickery. The
primitive Yankee, in view of his destiny as the founder of this
caucus-loving nation and American democracy, seems to have been
providentially guided in selecting beans for his most characteristic
article of diet.

But to move on through the market. The butter and cheese stalls have
their special attractions. The butyraceous gold in tubs and huge lumps
displayed in these stalls looks as though it was precipitated from milk
squeezed from Channel Island cows, those fawn-colored, fairest of dairy
animals. In its present shape it is the herbage of a thousand
clover-blooming meads and dewy hill-pastures in old Berkshire, in
Vermont and Northern New York, transformed by the housewife's churn into
edible gold. Not only butter and cheese are grass or of gramineous
origin, but all flesh is grass,--a physiological fact enunciated by
Holy Writ and strictly true.

Porcine flesh is too abundant here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan
forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in
their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in
his diet, is a myster