“Some people, again, think that nothing is economical but good eating.  Their flour is of an extra brand, their meat the first cut; the delicacies of every season, in their dearest stages, come home to their table with an apologetic smile,—­’It was scandalously dear, my love, but I thought we must just treat ourselves.’  And yet these people cannot afford to buy books, and pictures they regard as an unthought-of extravagance.  Trudging home with fifty dollars’ worth of delicacies on his arm, Smith meets Jones, who is exulting with a bag of crackers under one arm and a choice little bit of an oil painting under the other, which he thinks a bargain at fifty dollars. ’I can’t afford to buy pictures,’ Smith says to his spouse, ’and I don’t know bow Jones and his wife manage.’  Jones and his wife will live on bread and milk for a month, and she will turn her best gown the third time, but they will have their picture, and they are happy, Jones’s picture remains, and Smith’s fifty dollars’ worth of oysters and canned fruit to-morrow will be gone forever.  Of all modes of spending money, the swallowing of expensive dainties brings the least return.  There is one step lower than this,—­the consuming of luxuries that are injurious to the health.  If all the money spent on tobacco and liquors could be spent in books and pictures, I predict that nobody’s health would be a whit less sound, and houses would be vastly more attractive.  There is enough money spent in smoking, drinking, and over-eating to give every family in the community a good library, to hang everybody’s parlor-walls with lovely pictures, to set up in every house a conservatory which should bloom all winter with choice flowers, to furnish every dwelling with ample bathing and warming accommodations, even down to the dwellings of the poor; and in the Millennium I believe this is the way things are to be.

“In these times of peril and suffering, if the inquiry arises, How shall there be retrenchment?  I answer, First and foremost retrench things needless, doubtful, and positively hurtful, as rum, tobacco, and all the meerschaums of divers colors that do accompany the same.  Second, retrench all eating not necessary to health and comfort.  A French family would live in luxury on the leavings that are constantly coming from the tables of those who call themselves in middling circumstances.  There are superstitions of the table that ought to be broken through.  Why must you always have cake in your closet? why need you feel undone to entertain a guest with no cake on your tea-table?  Do without it a year, and ask yourselves if you or your children, or any one else, have suffered materially in consequence.

“Why is it imperative that you should have two or three courses at every meal?  Try the experiment of having but one, and that a very good one, and see if any great amount of suffering ensues.  Why must social intercourse so largely consist in eating?  In Paris there is a very pretty custom.  Each family has one evening in the week when it stays at home and receives friends.  Tea, with a little bread and butter and cake, served in the most informal way, is the only refreshment.  The rooms are full, busy, bright,—­everything as easy and joyous as if a monstrous supper, with piles of jelly and mountains of cake, were waiting to give the company a nightmare at the close.