est cuts were left for the bold. One was tempted to
pray that such pleuro might last for the season, save that the
Commissioners were so costly, and the dear cattle were having an
unusually sanguinary Bull Run. I know what our vegetarian friend, Mr.
Alcott, will say; but he must indulge me in a very small mania, even if
it seem to him a kind of cannibalism; therefore, whatever rhapsodies are
left from bread and potato, let them all be given to good beef. While
the quarrel of round, rump, and sirloin goes on, this let us buy and eat
and reinforce ourselves. In it are poems, powers, and possessions
ineffable. Twenty-five cents a pound, and the strength of the gods in
one's veins! Broil it carefully and rare, then go and toss quoits with
Hercules. In this, ye disconsolate, behold lands, lovers, and virtues in
plenty. It fills and steadies the pulse, and plants the planet plump
under one's feet. "My friend, is he who makes me do what I can," says
the sage. Only beefsteak can come to the rescue. If one were going to a
martyr's fire, of this should he eat, lest he die, not sublimely, with a
fainting body. He would try this steak, and then that stake.

But there is one event that comes alike to all, and that is a holiday
dinner. Even the poor have their plum-pudding days, and all seem to
think that on a Christmas or Thanksgiving Nature suspends her laws and
lets one eat as much as he can. It is quite in the spirit of the
Scottish Lord Cockburn, who, ending a long walk, used to say, "We will
eat a profligate supper,--a supper without regard to discretion or
digestion." Or after the theory of one who ate whatever he pleased,
whenever he pleased, and as much as he pleased, saying, "Oh, if it makes
me sick, I can take medicine. What are the doctors for, if 'tisn't to
cure people?" He did not know how small hope can be gotten from the
doctors, and how those who know best get more and more courage to travel
into places where they are not. There must have been a poor chance for
the Egyptians, who, Herodotus says, had a physician for each part of the
body; so that the human frame would seem to have been a sort of
university, and each of the organs a vacant professorship. In case of
malady, every officer worked away on his own member without regard to
what his medical neighbors were doing. Michelet mentions a fish that has
the power of multiplying stomachs to the number of one hundred and
twenty. Fortunately that power is not man's. Thi