to table.

MELTED BUTTER. Though a very essential article for the table, it is
seldom well prepared. Mix on a trencher, in the proportion of a
tea-spoonful of flour to four ounces of the best butter. Put it into a
saucepan, and two or three table-spoonfuls of hot water; boil it quick
for a minute, and shake it all the time. Milk used instead of water,
requires rather less butter, and looks whiter.

MICE. The poisonous substances generally prepared for the destruction of
mice are attended with danger, and the use of them should by all means
be avoided. Besides the common traps, baited with cheese, the following
remedy will be found both safe and efficacious. Take a few handfuls of
wheat flour, or malt meal, and knead it into a dough. Let it grow sour
in a warm place, mix with it some fine iron filings, form the mass into
small balls, and put them into the holes frequented by the mice. On
eating this preparation, they are inevitably killed. Cats, owls, or
hedgehogs, would be highly serviceable in places infested with mice. An
effectual mousetrap may be made in the following manner. Take a plain
four square trencher, and put into the two contrary corners of it a
large pin, or piece of knitting needle. Then take two sticks about a
yard long, and lay them on the dresser, with a notch cut at each end of
the sticks, placing the two pins on the notches, so that one corner of
the trencher may lie about an inch on the dresser or shelf that the mice
come to. The opposite corner must be baited with some butter and oatmeal
plastered on the trencher; and when the mice run towards the butter, it
will tip them into a glazed earthen vessel full of water, which should
be placed underneath for that purpose. To prevent the trencher from
tipping over so as to lose its balance, it may be fastened to the shelf
or dresser with a thread and a little sealing wax, to restore it to its
proper position. To prevent their devastations in barns, care should be
taken to lay beneath the floor a stratum of sharp flints, fragments of
glass mixed with sand, or broken cinders. If the floors were raised on
piers of brick, about fifteen inches above the ground, so that dogs or
cats might have a free passage beneath the building, it would prevent
the vermin from harbouring there, and tend greatly to preserve the
grain. Field mice are also very destructive in the fields and gardens,
burrowing under the ground, and digging up the earth when newly sown.
Th