RURAL SELF-DENIAL CLUBS.
The laudable custom adopted by agricultural societies of rewarding labourers for living and rearing families upon ten shillings a week, might be carried further out. Mutual improvement associations should be established among the rustics, for the purpose of cultivating abstinence by means of emulation. Country gentlemen would formerly encourage eating-matches among the peasantry: the reverse of this gross practice should be adopted now: and clodhopper should be pitted against clodhopper to do the greatest amount of work on the smallest quantity of bread and water in a given time. The clowns should also be stimulated to compete on holidays, particularly at those of Christmas, when the weather especially affords the requisite conditions, by trying which can continue longest sitting in the cold without any fire, and which can dispense to the greatest extent with clothes and bedding. By these wholesome exercises they will be trained to contentment with the very smallest possible participation in the fruits of that earth which they cultivate, so as to leave the larger share to the gentry who subsist by their industry, to be expended in all manner of comfort, pleasure, splendour, and magnificence. Thus, as happiness is attainable in either of two ways—one consisting in the satisfaction, the other in the conquest of our desires—they would make themselves happy by the former method, and their labourers by the latter.
WINCHESTER SOUP.
Pantropheon!—What does Soyer mean by that?
All-Nourisher—the Guide to Getting Fat—
But in that Book of Cookery, I'll be bound,
There's one receipt, at least, that won't be found—
Debtor's Consommé:—Take a bit of beef,