Did it make her sick?--you will ask. It did, indeed, and she expected it would. She would go immediately to bed, as soon as the huge bolus was swallowed, and lie there a day or two, perhaps two or three days. Occasionally such a surfeit cost her the confinement of a whole week. It is truly surprising that any Christian woman should thus make a beast of herself, for the sake of the momentary indulgence of the appetite; but so it is. I have met with a few such. Happily, however, conduct so low and bestial is not so frequent among females as males, though quite too frequent among the former so long as a single case is found, which could be prevented by reasoning or even by authority. There is one thing concerning butter which deserves notice, and which it may not be amiss to mention in this place. What we call butter, in this country,--what is used, I mean, at our tables,--is properly pickled or salted butter. Now, I suppose it is pretty well understood, that in some of the countries of Europe no such thing as salted or pickled butter is used or known. They make use of milk, cream, and a little fresh butter; but that is all. In the kingdom of Brazil, among the native population, at least, no such thing as butter, in any shape, has ever yet been known. Fresh butter is sufficiently difficult of digestion; but salted butter is much more so; and this is the main point to which I wish to call your attention. Why, what is our object in salting down butter? Is it not to prevent change? Would it not otherwise soon become acid and disagreeable? And does not salting it so harden or toughen it, or, as it were, fix it, that it will resist the natural tendency to decomposition or putrefaction? But will not this same "fixation," so to call it, prepare it to resist changes within the stomach as well as outside of it; or, in other words, prevent, in a measure, the work of digestion? Most unquestionably it will. And herein is the stronghold of objection to this article. Hence, too, the reason why it causes eruptions on the skin. The irritation begins on the lining membrane of the stomach. The latter is first coated with eruption; and, after a time, by what is called sympathy, the same tendency is manifested in the face. These things ought to be well understood. There is great ignorance on this subject, and what is known is generally the _ipse dixit_ of somebody. Reasons there are none for using salted butter. Or, if any, they are few, and frequently very flimsy and weak. Let us have hygiene taught us, were it only that we may know for ourselves the right and wrong of these matters. FOOTNOTES: [H] Since this was penned, the young woman has died of erysipelas. Can it be that she has been compelled, in this form, to pay a fearful penalty for her former abuses? One might think that twenty years of reformation would have worn out the diseased tendencies. Perhaps she recurred, in later years, unknown to the writer, to her former favorite article.