oles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars,
worth a dozen of those ice-houses, each of which costs our men of taste as
many scores of pounds. It is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one
should want ice _for_, in a country like this, except for clodpole boys to
slide upon, and to drown cockneys in skaiting-time; but if people must
have ice in summer, they may as well go a right way as a wrong way to get
it.

150. However, the patient that I have at this time under my hands wants
nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, I
will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be _smoked_; for
smoking is a great deal better than merely _drying_, as is the fashion in
the dairy countries in the West of England. When there were plenty of
_farm_-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers
have lived in gentleman's houses, and the main part of the farm-houses
have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. However, there is
scarcely any neighbourhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two
precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no _rain_
comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to
_melt_. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed
from _wood_, not turf, peat, or coal. Stubble or litter might do; but the
trouble would be great. _Fir_, or _deal_, smoke is not fit for the
purpose. I take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy
countries, and in the North, has led to the making of pork and dried
bacon. As to the _time_ that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend
a good deal upon whether there be a _constant fire beneath_, and whether
the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty
constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. But over smoking, or,
rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon _rust_. Great
attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not
be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly
dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side
pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that
of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This
keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of
crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would
otherwise be