tenth. The other meats are, mutton, forty-seven
dollars and sixty-seven cents; turkeys, chickens, etc., if you call them
meat, sixty-one dollars and fifty-six cents; lamb, seventeen dollars and
fifty-three cents; veal, eleven dollars and fifty-three cents; fresh
pork, one dollar and seventy-three cents. (This must have been for some
guest. Lois and I each had a grandfather named Enoch, and have Jewish
prejudices; also, fresh pork is really the most costly article of diet,
if you count in the doctor's bills. But for ham there is ten dollars and
twenty-two cents. Ham is always available, you know, Hero. For other
salt pork, I recommend you to institute a father or brother, or cousin
attached to you in youth, who shall carry on a model farm in the
country, and kill for you a model corn-fed pig every year, see it salted
with his own eyes, and send to you a half-barrel of the pork for a _gage
d'amour_. It is a much more sentimental present than rosebuds, dearest
Hero,--and it lasts longer. That is the way we do; and salt pork,
therefore, does not appear on our bills. But against such salt pork I
have no Hebrew prejudice. Try it, Hero, with paper-sliced potatoes fried
for breakfast.) All other forms of meat sum up only two dollars and
twenty-three cents. And now, Hero, I will explain to you the philosophy
of meats. You see they cost you a quarter part of what you spend.

Know, then, my dear child, that the real business of the three meals a
day,--of the neat luncheon you serve on your wedding-silver for Mrs.
Dubbadoe and her pretty daughter, when they drive in from Milton to see
you,--of the ice-cream you ate last night at the summer party which the
Bellinghams gave the Pinckneys,--of the hard-tack and boiled dog which
dear John is now digesting in front of Petersburg,--the real business, I
say, is to supply the human frame with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen in organized forms. It must be in organized matter. You might
pound your wedding-diamonds for carbon, you might give water from Jordan
for oxygen and hydrogen, and the snow-flakes of the Jungfrau might serve
the nitrogen for Leander's dinners, but, because these are not
organized, Leander's cheek would pale, and his teeth shake in their
sockets, and his muscles dwindle to packthreads, as William Augustus's
do in the Slovenly-Peter books, and he would die before your eyes, Hero!
Yes, he would die! Do not, in your love of him, therefore, feed him on
your diamonds. G