dish in the most elaborate manner, until, in many households, the cooking of food has come to be almost the chief end of life.  While the preparation of food should be looked upon as of so much importance as to demand the most careful consideration and thought as to its suitability, wholesomeness, nutritive qualities, and digestibility, it should by no means be made to usurp the larger share of one’s time, when simpler foods and less labor would afford the partakers equal nourishment and strength.

A great variety of foods at one meal exerts a potent influence in creating a love of eating, and is likewise a constant temptation to overeat.  Let us have well-cooked, nutritious, and palatable food, and plenty of it; variety from day to day, but not too great a variety at each meal.

The prevalent custom of loading the table with a great number of viands, upon occasions when guests are to be entertained in our homes, is one to be deplored, since it is neither conducive to good health nor necessary to good cheer, but on the contrary is still laborious and expensive a practice that many are debarred from social intercourse because they cannot afford to entertain after the fashion of their neighbors.  Upon this subject a well-known writer has aptly said:  “Simplify cookery, thus reducing the cost of living, and how many longing individuals would thereby be enabled to afford themselves the pleasure of culture and social intercourse!  When the barbarous practice of stuffing one’s guests shall have been abolished, a social gathering will not then imply, as it does now, hard labor, expensive outlay, and dyspepsia.  Perhaps when that time arise, we shall be sufficiently civilized to demand pleasures of a higher sort.  True, the entertainments will then, in one sense, be more costly, as culture is harder to come by than cake.  The profusion of viands now heaped upon the table, betrays poverty of the worst sort.  Having nothing better to offer, we offer victuals; and this we do with something of that complacent, satisfied air with which some more northern tribes present their tidbits of whale and walrus.”

TABLE TOPICS.

    “Let appetite wear reason’s golden chain,
    and find in due restrain its luxury.”

A man’s food, when he has the means and opportunity of selecting it, suggests his moral nature.  Many a Christian is trying to do by prayer that which cannot be done except through corrected diet.—­Talmage.

Our pious ancestors enacted a law that suicides should be buried where four roads meet, and that a cart-load of stones should be thrown upon the body.  Yet, when gentlemen or ladies commit suicide, not by cord or steel, but by turtle soup or lobster salad, they may be buried on consecrated ground, and the public are not ashamed to read an epitaph upon their tombstones false enough to make the marble blush.—­Horace Mann.