cotash, in the
squash,--the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them.
Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself at the dessert,--but
the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague. You are
ready to howl with despair, and your misery is great upon
you,--especially if this is a table where you have taken board for three
months with your delicate wife and four small children. Your case is
dreadful,--and it is hopeless, because long usage and habit have
rendered your host perfectly incapable of discovering what is the
matter. "Don't like the butter, Sir? I assure you I paid an extra price
for it, and it's the very best in the market. I looked over as many as a
hundred tubs, and picked out this one." You are dumb, but not less
despairing.

Yet the process of making good butter is a very simple one. To keep the
cream in a perfectly pure, cool atmosphere, to churn while it is yet
sweet, to work out the buttermilk thoroughly, and to add salt with such
discretion as not to ruin the fine, delicate flavor of the fresh
cream,--all this is quite simple, so simple that one wonders at
thousands and millions of pounds of butter yearly manufactured which are
merely a hobgoblin-bewitchment of cream into foul and loathsome poisons.

* * * * *

The third head of my discourse is that of _Meat_, of which America
furnishes, in the gross material, enough to spread our tables royally,
were it well cared for and served.

The faults in the meat generally furnished to us are, first, that it is
too new. A beefsteak, which three or four days of keeping might render
practicable, is served up to us palpitating with freshness, with all the
toughness of animal muscle yet warm. In the Western country, the
traveller, on approaching a hotel, is often saluted by the last shrieks
of the chickens which half an hour afterward are presented to him _a la_
spread-eagle for his dinner. The example of the Father of the Faithful,
most wholesome to be followed in so many respects, is imitated only in
the celerity with which the young calf, tender and good, was transformed
into an edible dish for hospitable purposes. But what might be good
housekeeping in a nomadic Emir, in days when refrigerators were yet in
the future, ought not to be so closely imitated as it often is in our
own land.

In the next place, there is a woful lack of nicety in the butcher's work
of cutting and preparing meat. Who t