, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a
sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition
of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the
demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass
that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want
of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his
life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an
economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put
my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,
which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a
stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get
smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour also; but have at last
found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In
cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of
this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian
his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and
they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which
I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study
of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such
authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first
invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and
meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and
travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring
of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and
through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good,
sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the
soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is
religiously preserved like the vestal fire--some precious bottleful,
I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for
America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in
cerealian billows over the land--this seed I regularly and faithfully
procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even
this was not indispensable--for my discoveries