France than of England.

Half of the recipes in our cook-books are mere murder to such
constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. We require to ponder these
things, and think how we in our climate and under our circumstances
ought to live, and in doing so, we may, without accusation of foreign
foppery, take some leaves from many foreign books.

* * * * *

But Christopher has prosed long enough. I must now read this to my wife,
and see what she says.

ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER.

I have never known, nor seen any person who did know, why Portland, the
metropolis of Oregon, was founded on the Willamette River. I am unaware
why the accent is on the penult, and not on the ultimate of Willamette.
These thoughts perplexed me more than a well man would have suffered
them, all the way from the Callapooya Mountains to Portland. I had been
laid up in the backwoods of Oregon, in a district known as the Long-Tom
Country,--(and certainly a longer or more tedious Tom never existed
since the days of him additionally hight Aquinas,)--by a violent attack
of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon
pilgrimage. I had been saved by the indefatigable nursing of the best
friend I ever travelled with,--by wet compresses, and the impossibility
of sending for any doctor in the region. I had lived to pay
San-Francisco hotel-prices for squatter-cabin accommodations in the
rural residence of an Oregon landholder, whose tender mercies I fell
into from my saddle when the disease had reached its height, and who
explained his unusual charges on the ground that his wife had felt for
me like a mother. In the Long-Tom Country maternal tenderness is a
highly estimated virtue. It cost Bierstadt and myself sixty dollars,
besides the reasonable charge for five days' board and attendance to a
man who ate nothing and was not waited on, with the same amount against
his well companion. We had suffered enough extortion before that to
exhaust all our native grumblery. So we paid the bill, and entered on
our notebooks the following

_Mem._ "In stopping with anybody in the Long-Tom Country, make a special
contract for maternal tenderness, as it will invariably be included in
the bill."

I had ridden on a straw-bed in the wagon of the man whose wife
cultivated the maternal virtues, until I was once more able to go along
by myself,--paying, you may be sure, maternal-virtue fare for my
carriage. During