st with any
woman in England. She bakes incomparable bread--firm, close, compact,
and white, thin-crusted, and admirably raised. Her yeast always works
well. What butter! Before it a primrose must hide its unyellowed head.
Then jam of the finest quality, goose, rasp, and strawberry! and as the
jam is, so are her jellies. Hens cackle that the eggs are fresh--and
these shrimps were scraping the sand last night in the Whitehaven sea.
What glorious bannocks of barley-meal! Crisp wheaten cakes, too, no
thicker than a wafer. Do not, our good sir, appropriate that cut of
pickled salmon; it is heavier than it looks, and will weigh about four
pounds. One might live a thousand years, yet never weary of such
mutton-ham. Virgin honey, indeed! Let us hope that the bees were not
smothered, but by some gracious disciple of Bonar or Huber decoyed from
a full hive into an empty one, with half the summer and all the autumn
before them to build and saturate their new Comb-Palace. No bad thing
is a cold pigeon-pie, especially of cushats. To hear them cooing in the
centre of a wood is one thing, and to see them lying at the bottom of a
pie is another--which is the better, depends entirely on time, place,
and circumstance. Well, a beef-steak at breakfast is rather
startling--but let us try a bit with these fine ingenuous youthful
potatoes, from a light sandy soil on a warm slope. Next to the country
clergy, smugglers are the most spiritual of characters; and we verily
believe that to be "sma' still." Our dear sir--you are in orders, we
believe--will you have the goodness to return thanks? Yes, now you may
ring the bell for the bill. Moderate indeed! With a day's work before
one, there is nothing like the deep broad basis of breakfast.

STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

SECOND SAUNTER.

It is yet only ten o'clock--and what a multitude of thoughts and
feelings, sights and sounds, lights and shadows, have been ours since
sunrise! Had we been in bed, all would have remained unfelt and unknown.
But, to be sure, one dream might have been worth them all. Dreams,
however, when they are over, are gone, be they of bliss or bale, heaven
or the shades. No one weeps over a dream. With such tears no one would
sympathise. Give us reality, "the sober certainty of waking bliss," and
to it memory shall cling. Let the object of our sorrow belong to the
living world, and, transient though it be, its power may be immortal.
Away then, as of little worth, all the u