by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed nervous and cerebral fibre.  Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient ear.  You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and feelings.  Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the “Almanach des Gourmands,” that a certain sauce piquante was so fine that with it a man would eat his own mother?  This was only twenty years ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor.  What sublimity of peddling!

To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer, that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther from Nature.  Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how much is hoop-civilization.  To those, again, who object, that it is too primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in the ball-room,—­we mean by their upper portion.

But revenons a nos moutons.  The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert, missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature eat “long pig,”—­as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in contradistinction to “short-pig,” by which they designate our squealing fellow-roasters,—­from three different motives.—­When a chief has a gala-day, or desires to signal his arrival by a right royal feast, it is considered befitting to slaughter some men, to let the blood run in the path of royalty, and to have on the table some roast-homme.  Our Captain Wilkins told us, years ago, that, for this roast-homme, a plump Fijiana, of some twelve or thirteen years, is preferred.  They know very well what is good!—­The second motive is hatred.  When a Fijian mortally hates a person, he endeavors to kill him; and having killed the enemy, why should the victim not be eaten?—­Lastly, it would seem that affectionate regard, especially for a favorite wife, sometimes rises to a mordant passion and an unconquerable longing for material assimilation,—­so much so, that the loving husband roasts his Penelope, and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth, as the polygamic case may be.  Perhaps, years after, when with less demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with Petrarch’s fervor,—­

            “Perche Morte fura
  Prima i migliori, e lascia star i rei: 
  Questa aspettata al regno degli Dei
  Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura.”