I shall close this book, and take my full dosefive hundred drops.

June 22nd.—Our prospects look better today. Mr. Blake's nervous suffering is greatly

June 25th, Monday.-The day of the experiment! It is five o'clock in the afternoon. We have just arrived at the house.

A SLICE OFF THE JOINT.

allayed. He slept a little last night. My night, LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE. thanks to the opium, was the night of a man who is stunned. I can't say that I woke this morning; the fitter expression would be, that I recovered my senses.

HOMER is a great authority on the question how the Greeks of the heroic ages cooked their meat. May we, therefore, be pardoned if we stop on the threshold of our article to make a remark or two about the probable profession of "blind old Mæonides," before we proceed to prove the poet's truly English predilection for roast beef?

We have been recently informed, by our

We drove to the house to see if the refurnishing was done. It will be completed to-morrow -Saturday. As Mr. Blake foretold, Betteredge raised no further obstacles. From first to last, he was ominously polite, and ominously silent. My medical enterprise (as Betteredge calls it) must now, inevitably, be delayed until Monday next. To-morrow evening, the work-wide-read and energetic friend Dreikopf, that men will be late in the house. On the next the learned world of Germany has, for the last day, the established Sunday tyranny which is fifteen years, been literally torn to pieces by one of the institutions of this free country, so a tremendous and apparently inexhaustible times the trains as to make it impossible to ask controversy on this question carried on beanybody to travel to us from London. Until tween the sagacious Bopp of Jena, and the Monday comes, there is nothing to be done but erudite Klopp of Heidelberg. No old scholar to watch Mr. Blake carefully, and to keep him, or young student but has taken his beer-glass if possible, in the same state in which I find in one hand and his Homer in the other, and him to-day." ranged himself under the flaunting flag of Klopp, or the blustering banner of Bopp. The light of Jena contends, on the one part, that Homer was a carcass-butcher at Chios; while the luminary of Heidelberg argues, with equal virulence, that the blind harper was a house-surgeon at Smyrna.

In the meanwhile, I have prevailed on him to write to Mr. Bruff, making a point of it that he shall be present as one of the witnesses. I especially choose the lawyer, because he is strongly prejudiced against us. If we convince him, we place our victory beyond the possibility of dispute.

A good deal of outward courtesy has hitherto Mr. Blake has also written to Sergeant Cuff: been maintained by both disputants; but in and I have sent a line to Miss Verinder. With secret, Dreikopf, who has visited both camps as these, and with old Betteredge (who is really a strict neutral, confesses to us that there exists a person of importance in the family) we shall much bitterness of feeling and less restraint of have witnesses enough for the purpose-with-temper than might have been expected between out including Mrs. Merridew, if Mrs. Merridew two such great scholars. persists in sacrificing herself to the opinion of the world.

June 23rd. The vengeance of the opium overtook me again last night. No matter; I must go on with it now till Monday is past and

gone.

Bopp says to his students, "How can this fool, this Baotian ox, deny that Homer never speaks of the cutting up of meat without showing a gusto, taste, and knowledge, unobtainable by any one unless he had been a prac tical butcher? Let the atrocious ass refer, if he choose, to the Ninth Iliad, verse 270. Mr. Blake is not so well again to-day. At The ninnyhammer will there see that when a two this morning, he confesses that he opened Greek deputation is sent to Achilles to try the drawer in which his cigars are put away. and win him back to the allied army, PatroHe only succeeded in locking it up again by a clus takes three chines (pig, sheep, and goat), violent effort. His next proceeding, in case of and transfixes and divides them with a discriaccident, was to throw the key out of window. minating skill worthy of any flesh-market. Let The waiter brought it in this morning, dis- the swollen bull-frog of Heidelberg dulness also covered at the bottom of an empty cistern-turn, if he can read pure Greek well enough, to such is Fate! I have taken possession of the key, until Tuesday next.

June 24th.-Mr. Blake and I took a long drive in an open carriage. We both felt benefically the blessed influence of the soft summer air. I dined with him at the hotel. To my great relief-for I found him in an over-wrought, over-excited state, this morning-he had two hours' sound sleep on the sofa after dinner. If he has another bad night, now-1 am not afraid of the consequences.

the First Iliad, verse 600, where he will find the Greeks who sacrifice the hecatomb to appease Apollo, severing the thighs of the oxen and wrapping choice morsels for the gods in the double caul."

Such are a few of Bopp's learned arguments, and Bopp is very convincing indeed until you hear Klopp. That star of Heidelberg talks most irreverently of his adversary. "Culmination of pedantry !" he sometimes says, as if Bopp were actually present in the lecture-room. "How can he talk to me of butchers and such plebeian vul

and nutritious. Madame Dacier's arguments are untenable; and we hereby (without arrogance) consign them for ever to the limbo of vanities. It is the joint, the pièce de resistance, that constitutes the special difference between Eng

garity, when he sees that in his battles Homer always wounds his heroes in the most learned and anatomical way? Storm and weather! Are we to be dictated to by these old jackdaws of Jena, who think that the church belongs to them because they chatter on the weathercock?lish and French cooking. The barbaric lumps Does not Homer, in the Thirteenth Iliad, verse 812, make Merion slay Harpalion the Paphlagonian by a thrust under the hip bone and through the bladder? Does he not (idiot) represent Thoas killed by Antilochus (accomplished blockhead) by a javelin that cuts the hollow vein that extends to the neck along the chine? And again I ask (wooden brains) does not King Hypenor fall, in the Thirteenth Iliad (five hundred and twentieth verse) pierced through his liver? Endless, indeed, are the ways in which this divine medical man inflicts death on the dummies or minor personages of his great poem." So far Klopp, who is irrefutable till you hear Bopp. But, indeed, though there is more acuteness about Klopp, there is more grasp about Bopp. If Klopp be more vigorous, Bopp is more refined. Klopp is the luxuriant summer meadow, Bopp the rolled velvet lawn. If Bopp steal on with his fertilising stream, silent and unobserved as the subterranean New River, Klopp rolls on, broad, open, and generous as the Thames, but, like that river, stained here and there by the dead dog of prejudice and the floating cat of professional envy. If Bopp rise like a skyrocket, Klopp remains longer in the air. If Bopp blaze brighter and more like the violent Vesuvian, Klopp, like the wax candle of society, burns longer and clearer. Bopp's theories astonish, but Klopp's are read with perpetual delight. In fact, whether Klopp has beaten Bopp, or Bopp has pounded Klopp, it will take many centuries and many hogsheads of ink to settle.

Madame Dacier (that learned lady of Languedoc, who translated Iliad and Odyssey), was of opinion that there was no allusion in Homer to any way of cooking except roasting! From this some critics as hasty as Madame have argued that at the time of the siege of Troy the Greeks had no fire-proof vessels. In the Ninth Iliad, however, where Achilles feasts his unbidden guests, Homer especially says that Patroclus put by mutton and goat's flesh to roast and boil, while a fat shoulder of pork was being got ready for the spit; or, as old Chapman rhymes it, in his grand, rumbling, rough

of meat, such as the Norsemen carved with their walruss-horn-handled daggers, are the incarnations of discord which we and the French have long fought over. Ever since Mary de Medici's courtiers brought Italian cooking and the refinement of side dishes into France, the joint has been disregarded on the other side of the Channel. There are some bitter people, indeed, who say that the French are obliged to cook better than we do, and that the Frenchwomen are obliged to dress better; because their meat is so bad, and because their women are ugly. The less beauty, the more dress-the worse the meat, the more need of sauce. But this remark is grossly unfair, for the Freuch beef, though not so exquisitely marbled as our own, nor so fat or tender, is often of good quality; and as for Frenchwomen, though we can scarcely be expected to allow them to be so beautiful as the English, they are so pleasing and so agreeable that they need no extraneous advantages, and could afford to despise the very cestus of Venus. But, there is no doubt, that however much the tastes of the two nations may once have harmonised, the tendency in England is to the one simple dish, and in France to a variety of savoury delicacies, often quite as pleasant and digestible as the solid slices of meat that the poorer Englishman affects.

The simplicity of taste (or the barbarity, which shall we call it?) must be inherent in our nature: it assuredly is not a question of quantity, for most Frenchmen eat more than most Englishmen.

It has been well said that a Frenchwoman is always cooking, while an Englishwoman leaves off her preparations for a meal till the last possible moment, and then hurries the roasting and gallops the boiling. Hence, arise failure and indigestion. Still this incontrovertible fact remains, that spite of all cooking you cannot in Paris get a rumpsteak that approaches the steak of a good London tavern. Ask for a "bifstek" in the Palais Royal par exemple, and François, or Pierre, will bring you a little lump of beef of a pleasant savoury brown colour, a little crimsoned, embedded in crisp shavings of baked potatoes. You know that the white capped chef has longed to anoint it To roast and boil, right cunningly; then of a well-with sauce Robert, Sorel, Sharp, or Tomato, fed swine,

way:

Automedon held, while he pieces cut,

to remove its barbarous simplicity. It eats A huge fat shoulder he cuts out and spits it won-well and tender, but a little tasteless, and

drous fine.

Another piece of evidence which shows that the Homeric Greeks boiled meat, is, that in the Odyssey, one of the insolent suitors flings the foot of an ox at Ulysses, whom he takes for a beggar on the tramp. Now, no people would ever have served up a roast leg of beef to table; or if they had, would they have left the hoof on? Whereas, boiled cow heel is dainty, gelatinous,

it is without much natural fat of its own, the Norman beast being of the lean kine genus, and by no means a bull of Bashan; you eat, and as you eat patiently, you ruminate on the past life of the unknown animal, part of which you are devouring. But a London steak is a far different thing; it is thicker, fatter, juicier, and of a rarer merit; it has been beaten worse than any Christian galley slave by the Turks,

and has been broiled with a learned and almost coriander, cinnamon, and sugar finely beaten, unerring instinct. It requires no effort of di- and mixed with grated bread or flour; 6. For gestion, it melts in the mouth like a peach, young pigs, grated bread or flour mixed with passes at once into the blood, and goes straight beaten nutmeg, ginger, pepper, sugar, and yolks to recruit the heart. It is a sort of meat fruit, of eggs; 7. Sugar, bread, and salt mixed. For and merely requires the soft pressure of the bastings: 1. Fresh butter; 2. Chopped suet; lips. Broiling, to tell the truth however, re- 3. Minced sweet herbs, butter, and claret (espequires no common mind. To broil, is to per- cially for mutton and lamb); 4. Water and salt. form an operation which is the result of cen-5. Cream and melted butter (especially for turies of experience acquired by a nation that flayed pig); 6. Yolks of eggs, grated biscuit, relishes, always did relish, and probably always and juice of oranges. will relish, broils. It requires cleanliness, watchfulness, patience, profound knowledge of great chemical laws, a quick eye, and a swift hand. The Homeric heroes are supposed to have lived on broils, and this branch of cooking is deserving of the utmost respect.

The old rule of roasting and boiling is about twenty minutes to the pound; fifteen minutes is scarcely enough, especially in cold weather, in a draughty kitchen, or at a slack fire. The fire for roasting should burn up gradually, and not attain its full power until the joint is apA young cook should be always informed proaching perfection. Boiled meat cannot boil that it takes years to learn how to broil a rump too slowly. Boiling wastes less of the meat than steak; for a thousand impish difficulties surround roasting. Beef, by boiling, loses twenty-six and the broiler, and do their worst to spoil the a half per cent; by baking, thirty; by roasting, dainty morsel, and prevent its reaching the ex- thirty-two per cent; boiling is also, though pectant jaws. If the gridiron be not bright as less savoury, a more economical way of cook silver, and clean between the bars, the meat willing, as the water used receives the gelatine of suffer. If the bars be not rubbed with suet the meat and makes an excellent basis for they will print themselves on the steak. If the fire be not bright and clear, there is no hope for the broiler. If the broil be hurried, it will be smoked or burnt. If the gridiron be over heated before the steak is put on it, it will scorch the steak. If the gridiron be cold, the part of the meat covered by the bars will be underdone. If the gridiron be not kept slanting, the constant flare and smoke, from the fat streaming into the fire, will spoil the steak. If no salt be sprinkled on the fire, the meat will very likely taste of brimstone, which the salt should exorcise.

Few people seem to know that rump steaks are not at their best, except from October to April. It is only in the colder months that they can be taken from meat hung at least four days to make it tender. When fresh they are mere fibrous masses of unconquerable gristly fibre. A good steak often turned to prevent burning, and to keep the gravy at the centre, takes ten minutes to broil. It should be eaten with a table-spoonful of warmed catsup, and a little finely minced shalot.

Mutton, says the eccentric Dr. Kitchener, requires a brisk fierce fire, quick and clear; but beef, a large sound one. To judge from Robert May's Accomplisht Cook (1665), written five years after the Restoration by a man who had been apprenticed to the chefs at the Grocers' Hall and Star Chamber, and had afterwards officiated in Lady Dormer's kitchen, bastings and dredgings were thought of supreme importance in the reign of Charles the Second. May enumerates seven forms of dredgings, and six of bastings, some, perhaps, worthy of preservation. The dredgings are: 1. Flour mixed with grated bread; 2. Sweet herbs dried and powdered, mixed with bread-crumbs; 3. Lemonpeel pounded, or orange-peel mixed with flour; 4. Powdered sugar mixed with pounded cinnamon, flour, or grated bread; 5. Fennel seeds,

soup, which it is mad extravagance to throw away. The charm of a roast joint is the beautiful pale-brown colour. The sign of a roast joint being thoroughly done (saturated with heat) is when the steam rising from it draws towards the fire.

In the old cocked-hat times, when an inn kitchen was the traveller's sweetest refuge, and the sight of the odorous joint revolving majestically on the spit was one of the most refreshing of landscapes-in those distant ages, when the postilion's whip sounded frequently at the inn door, and the creaking of the inn sign was tired nature's most grateful lullaby-the red-faced choleric cook made great to-do with her steel spits and pewter plates. Those were hard times for the kitchen wenches, the scullions, and the turnspit dogs, the latter of whom used often to hide when they saw the meat arrive at the kitchen door. The jack had to be scoured, oiled, wiped, and kept covered up. It was in those days that Swift, in his droll bitter way, advised the cook to carefully leave the winders on whilst the jack was going round, in order that they might fly off and knock out the brains of half a dozen of those idle, thievish, chattering footmen who were always clustering round the dripping-pan.

It was Swift who also enriched our literature with a rhyming recipe to roast mutton. It is a pleasant banter on the stultifying love verses and pastoral songs of Queen Anne's time:

Gently stir and blow the fire,

Lay the mutton down to roast,
Dress it quickly, I desire,

In the dripping put a toast
That I hunger may remove-
Mutton is the meat I love.
On the dresser see it lie,

Oh! the charming white and red,
Finer meat ne'er met the eye,

On the sweetest grass it fed.

It contains some weak lines, and some which three or four steaks at the club over which are exquisitely worded.

And it ends with a verse of admirable and that no dinner ever quite resembled its preheroic grandiloquence :

decessor. One night, the ox was from some special county; another night, the cook was in good humour, and excelled himself; a third Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day. time, the meat had been kept to the very hour, It has been often disputed whether a con- and was done to the very turn. He also continued diet of heef or of mutton would soonest sidered that in the middle of the rump "there grow intolerable. We give our black ball with lurked a fifth essence, the perfect ideal of tenderthe firmness of an ancient Roman, against beef.ness and flavour." For this he always tarried The more mannered a meat is, the sooner it and recruited his forces, fortified by his second grows wearisome. Do we not all remember bottle of port. It was reported by the scanhow the old indentures of Newcastle appren-dalous that the duke always preceded these tices always contained a clause limiting the dinners at the "Steaks" by a secret preliminary number of salmon dinners? The poor lads would dish of fish. They say it was a grand sight to

see the rosy duke (his orange-coloured ribbon
and silver gridiron, not yet assumed) listening
to one of Captain Morris's sparkling Baccha-
nalian songs, rubbing meantime a clean plate
with a fragrant shalot, preparatory to his third
steak, in front of the gridiron-grating through
which the cooks were seen at work behind that
portcullis over which was inscribed the apt
quotation from Macbeth,

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

POOR RELIEF IN AUSTRALIA.

spend it? Every year a president, treasurer, and committee of sixteen gentlemen, are selected by and out of the subscribers of one pound a year or upward. This is the staff of managers, and the whole power is placed in their hands. They are unpaid, and conduct the rather laborious business of the institution as a work of love. Our building stands in a reserve of about six acres; it is built in the Elizabethan style, and has cost about sixteen thousand pounds. There is accommodation for nearly three hundred inmates.

Let us go over it. We enter a spacious waiting-hall. To the left are apartments for women and children, master and matron's rooms, IN providing for our poor, we in Australia kitchen, laundry, &c. The centre and right are have the advantage of being without tra- appropriated to men, including a large sick ward. dition. We have no venerable schemes to The first room we enter in the centre, is the abandon, no rare old abuses to get rid of. men's dining-room: scrupulously clean, light, Beadledom is unknown. We therefore start and pleasant. Used also for religious service. fair. But in this land of gold and plenty, Down a passage we find the men's sitting-rooms; where we buy a leg of mutton or a dozen of the older men in one; the younger in the other. peaches for a shilling, can there be poverty? That tall old man fought at Waterloo, and there, Well, yes. The poor are still in our land. too, is one of Nelson's heroes. There are Doubtless all classes of labourers are much Scotchmen playing draughts, and there is a better off than at home; we always call Eng- Frenchman playing a fiddle. On the table are land home. But there is poverty, and that, the daily papers, several English papers, magatoo, to some considerable extent. In the un-zines, &c. A Chinaman and a New Zealander settled state of our population, men change continually their places of abode. So it happens that careless husbands leave their wives and families without means of support. Again, in our mining districts accidents are of far too frequent occurrence. In many different ways the bread-winner is suddenly cut down. Moreover, even in this splendid climate men and women do grow old, and, from some cause or other, have made no provision for declining years. They, too, must be supported. Lastly, there is drunkenness, which here, as everywhere, adds not a few to the list of those who receive charitable aid. In the great metropolitan goldfield, Ballarat and surrounding district, out of a population of a little over sixty thousand, some seven hundred per week receive aid from a public institution.

What that public institution is, and how it does its work, we propose now to tell.

Poorhouse or workhouse are still names unknown in Australia. Our institution is called The Benevolent Asylum, and every true Australian prays that the time may never come when our children shall forget the sacred claims of charity, and put their trust in poor laws and workhouses.

Before relief can be given, the wherewithal must of necessity first be got. We have no poor rates. How, then, is money obtained? Last year the public gave us in subscriptions two thousand one hundred and eighty-two pounds, and the government supplemented it by a grant of four thousand pounds, so that we have an income of six thousand one hundred and eightytwo pounds, besides payment from government for deserted children and other items, making altogether about eight thousand pounds. Money being provided, the next question is, who is to

are admiring the last number of the Illustrated London News. Some are reading novels, some are discussing politics, some are simply enjoying light, air, cleanliness, and human companionship.

Sleeping wards are up-stairs. Each inmate has an iron bedstead, mattrass, blankets, and white counterpane. At the head of each bed is a neat wooden chest, serving as a seat and a receptacle for clothes, and other private property of the residents. Over some of the beds you may see photographs of loved but lost or far-distant friends. The master can be, and very frequently is, communicated with at all hours of the night. Go into the grounds; there we have, first, a flower-garden radiant in this autumn month of March with fuchsias, pelargoniums, geraniums, roses, dahlias, gladioli, liliums, petunias, &c. On each side are vegetable gardens with all ordinary English vegetables, magnificent vegetable marrows, cucumbers, tomatoes, &c. It is very seldom that the first prize for vegetables at the Horticultural Society's shows is not taken by the gardener to the Benevolent Asylum." His prize vegetables are consumed in soup, and are in various other ways disposed of by the inmates. Here may be seen sundry old men and others who can do a little work, earning extras in the shape of plugs of tobacco and pats of butter, by digging, weeding, or generally making themselves useful. In the centre of the vegetable garden one cannot fail to see a good-sized arbour covered with Banksia and other roses. This-oh, Mr. Bounderby, is not this turtle soup ?-is the smoking-room. Old men, who have smoked all their lives, must smoke; hence, all over fifty are allowed a plug of tobacco weekly; and other tobacco may be