dinner-tables can never show
meat, vegetables, or fruit equal to Mr. Iden's. The meat was dark brown,
as mutton should be, for if it is the least bit white it is sure to be
poor; the grain was short, and ate like bread and butter, firm, and yet
almost crumbling to the touch; it was full of juicy red gravy, and cut
pleasantly, the knife went through it nicely; you can tell good meat
directly you touch it with the knife. It was cooked to a turn, and had
been done at a wood fire on a hearth; no oven taste, no taint of coal
gas or carbon; the pure flame of wood had browned it. Such emanations as
there may be from burning logs are odorous of the woodland, of the
sunshine, of the fields and fresh air; the wood simply gives out as it
burns the sweetness it has imbibed through its leaves from the
atmosphere which floats above grass and flowers. Essences of this order,
if they do penetrate the fibres of the meat, add to its flavour a
delicate aroma. Grass-fed meat, cooked at a wood fire, for me.

Wonderful it is that wealthy people can endure to have their meat
cooked over coal or in a shut-up iron box, where it kills itself with
its own steam, which ought to escape. But then wealthy villa people do
do odd things. _Les Miserables_ who have to write like myself must put
up with anything and be thankful for permission to exist; but people
with mighty incomes from tea, or crockery-ware, or mud, or bricks and
mortar--why on earth these happy and favoured mortals do not live like
the gods passes understanding.

Parisian people use charcoal: perhaps Paris will convert some of you who
will not listen to a farmer.

Mr. Iden had himself grown the potatoes that were placed before him.
They were white, floury, without a drop of water in the whole dish of
them. They were equal to the finest bread--far, far superior to the
bread with which the immense city of London permits itself to be
poisoned. (It is not much better, for it destroys the digestion.) This,
too, with wheat at thirty shillings the quarter, a price which is in
itself one of the most wonderful things of the age. The finest bread
ought to be cheap.

"They be forty-folds," said Mr. Iden, helping himself to half a dozen.
"Look at the gravy go up into um like tea up a knob of sugar."

The gravy was drawn up among the dry, floury particles of the potatoes
as if they had formed capillary tubes.

"Forty-folds," he repeated; "they comes forty to one. It be an amazing
theng how