To feed it, as Lois has just now shown you, cost in the year 1863 nine hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents. That is the way we chose to live. We could have lived just as happily on half that sum,—we could have lived just as wretchedly on ten times that sum. But, however we lived, the proportions of our expense would not have varied much from what I am now to teach you, dear Hero (if that really be your name).
Butter is the biggest expense-item of all. Of our nine hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents, ninety-one dollars and twenty-six cents went for butter. Remember that your butter is one-tenth part of the whole.
Next comes flour. Our seven barrels cost us seventy dollars and eighty-three cents. We bought, besides, six dollars and seventy-six cents' worth of bread, and six dollars and seventy-one cents' worth of crackers,—convenient sometimes, dear Hero. So that your wheat-flour and bread are almost a tenth of the whole.
Next comes beef, in all forms, ninety dollars and seventy-six cents; there goes another tenth. The other meats are, mutton, forty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents; turkeys, chickens, etc., if you call them meat, sixty-one dollars and fifty-six cents; lamb, seventeen dollars and fifty-three cents; veal, eleven dollars and fifty-three cents; fresh pork, one dollar and seventy-three cents. (This must have been for some guest. Lois and I each had a grandfather named Enoch, and have Jewish prejudices; also, fresh pork is really the most costly article of diet, if you count in the doctor's bills. But for ham there is ten dollars and twenty-two cents. Ham is always available, you know, Hero. For other salt pork, I recommend you to institute a father or brother, or cousin attached to you in youth, who shall carry on a model farm in the country, and kill for you a model corn-fed pig every year, see it salted with his own eyes, and send to you a half-barrel of the pork for a gage d'amour. It is a much more sentimental present than rosebuds, dearest Hero,—and it lasts longer. That is the way we do; and salt pork, therefore, does not appear on our bills. But against such salt pork I have no Hebrew prejudice. Try it, Hero, with paper-sliced potatoes fried for breakfast.) All other forms of meat sum up only two dollars and twenty-three cents. And now, Hero, I will explain to you the philosophy of meats. You see they cost you a quarter part of what you spend.
Know, then, my dear child, that the real business of the three meals a day,—of the neat luncheon you serve on your wedding-silver for Mrs. Dubbadoe and her pretty daughter, when they drive in from Milton to see you,—of the ice-cream you ate last night at the summer party which the Bellinghams gave the Pinckneys,—of the hard-tack and boiled dog which dear John is now digesting in front of Petersburg,—the real business, I say, is to supply the human frame with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in organized forms. It must be in organized matter. You might pound your wedding-diamonds for carbon, you might give water from Jordan for oxygen and hydrogen, and the snow-flakes of the Jungfrau might serve the nitrogen for Leander's dinners, but, because these are not organized, Leander's cheek would pale, and his teeth shake in their sockets, and his muscles dwindle to packthreads, as William Augustus's do in the Slovenly-Peter books, and he would die before your eyes, Hero! Yes, he would die! Do not, in your love of him, therefore, feed him on your diamonds. Give him organized matter. Now, in doing this, you have been wise in spending even a tenth of your substance on wheat. For wheat is almost pure food; and wheat contains all you want,—more carbon than your diamonds, more oxygen and hydrogen than your tears, more nitrogen than the snow-flake,—but not nitrogen enough, dear Hero.
"More nitrogen!" gasps Leander, "more nitrogen, my charmer, or I die!" This is the real meaning of the words, when he says, "Let us have roast-beef for dinner," or when he asks you to pass him the butter.
Although beef, then, has little more than a quarter as much food in it as wheat has, you must have some beef, or something like it, because Leander, and you too, my rosy-cheek, must have nitrogen as well as carbon.
I beg you not to throw the "Atlantic" away at this point, my child. Do not say that Mr. Carter is an old fool, and that you never meant to live on vegetables. A great many people have meant to, and have never known what was the matter with them, when the real deficiency was nitrogen. Besides, child, though wheat is the best single feeder of all, as I have told you, because in its gluten it has so much nitrogen, this is to be said of all vegetables, that, so far as we live on them, we exist slowly; to a certain extent we have to ruminate as the cows do, and not as men and women should ruminate, and all animal or functional life goes more slowly on. Now, Hero, you and Leander both have to lead a rapid life. Most people do in the autumn of 1864. So give him meat, dear Hero, as above.
As for my being an old fool, my dear, I have said I am one hundred and nine, which is older than old Mr. Waldo was, older than everybody except old Parr. And after forty, everybody is a fool—or a physician.
Let us return, then, to our mutton,—always a good thing to return to, especially if the plates are hot, as yours, Hero, always will be. For mutton, besides such water as you can dry out of it, contains twenty-nine per cent. of food,—for meat, a high percentage.