"So he solemnly thrust himself into the malicious (as you would say) garment, and went through the services as well as he could, considering that his audience seemed singularly agitated, and indeed on the point of bursting out into a general laugh, throughout the entire service. And no wonder! The good Doctor, in his zeal for conformity, had attired himself in the black cambric duster in which the pulpit was shrouded during week-days, and had been gesticulating his eloquent homily with his arms thrust through the holes left for the pulpit-lamps!"
WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?
I think I must be personally known to most of the readers of the "Atlantic." I see them wherever I go, and they see me. Beneath a shelter-tent by the Rapidan, in a striped railroad-station in Bavaria, at the counter of Trübner's bookstore in London, and at Cordaville, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, as we waited for the freight to get out of the way, I have read the "Atlantic" over their shoulders, or they over mine. The same thing has happened at six hundred and thirty-two other improbable places. More than this, however, my words and works in the great science of Domestic Economy have travelled everywhere before me, not simply like the Connecticut of the poet,
"Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man,"[35]
but extending all over the civilized world. Not that I am the author of the clothes-wringing machine, or of the spring clothes-pin,—my influence has been more subtile. I have propounded great central axioms in housekeeping and the other economies, which have rushed over the world with the inevitable momentum of truth. It was I, for instance, who first discovered and proclaimed the great governing fact that the butter of a family costs more than its bread. It was I who first announced that you cannot economize in the quality of your paper. I am the discoverer of the formula that a family consumes as many barrels of flour in a year as it has adult members, reducing children to adults by the rule of three. The morning after our marriage I raised the window-shade, so that the rising sun of that auspicious day should shine full upon our parlor-Brussels. I said to Lois, "Let us never be slaves to our carpets!" The angel smiled assent; and on the wings of that smile my whisper fluttered over the earth. It brooded in a thousand homes else miserable. Light was where before was chaos. Sunshine drove scrofula from ten thousand quivering frames, and millions of infant lips would this day raise Lois's name and mine in their Kindergarten songs, did they only know who were their benefactors.
Standing thus in the centre of the sphere of the domestic economies, I have, of course, read with passionate interest the "House and Home Papers" in the "Atlantic." It is I, as I am proud to confess, who have, violated all copyright, have had them reprinted, as Tract No. 2237 of the American Tract Society, No. 63 of the American Tract Society of Boston, and No. 445 of the issues of the Sanitary Commission, and am now about to introduce them surreptitiously into the bureaus of these charities, so that the colporteurs, of every stripe, may at last be certain that they are conferring the first of benefits upon their homeless fellow-creatures. It is I who every night toil through long streets that I may slide these little tracts, messengers of blessing, under the front-doors of wretched friends, who are dying without homes in the gilded miseries of their bowling-alley parlors. Where they have introduced the patent weather-strip, I place the tract on the upper door-step, with a brick-bat, which keeps it from blowing away. But I observe that it is no part of the plan of those charming papers, more than it was of the "Novum Organon" or of the "Principia," to descend into the details of the economies. I suppose that the author left all that to the "Domestic Economy" of her excellent sister, and, as far as the details of practice go, well she might. But between that practical detail by which one sister cooks to-day the dinners on a million tables, and the æsthetic, moral, and religious considerations by which the other sister elevates the life of the million homes in whose dining-rooms those tables stand, there is room for a brief exposition of the principles on which those dinners are to be selected.
It is that exposition which, as I sit superior, I am to give, ex cathedra, after this long preface, now.
I shall illustrate the necessity of this exposition by an introduction to follow the preface, after the manner of the Germans, before we arrive at the substance of our work, which will be itself comprised in its first chapter. This introduction will consist of two illustrations. The first relates to the planting of potatoes. When I inherited my ancestral estate, known as "Crusoe's Well," I resolved to devote it to potatoes for the first summer. I summoned my vassals, and we fenced it. I bought dung and manured it. I hired ploughmen and oxen, and they ploughed it. I made a covenant with a Kelt, who became, quoad hoc, my slave, and gave to him money, with which I directed him to buy seed-potatoes and plant it.
And he,—"How many shall I buy?"