It is very bewildering. The advice one gets points in such opposite directions. For instance, the neighbor made friends the very first evening with Papa, who walked with injudicious inattention in our garden and slipped down through a gap in the fence into his orchard and his arms, he being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for his wife to make jam of; and he told me when he came in one day at dinner and found me struggling through what he considered dark ways and I thought were cabbages, that my salvation lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that afternoon and bought three pounds of them. They were dear, and dreadfully heavy to carry up the hill, and when I was panting past the neighbor's gate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right through the advertisements in the paper every morning and spends her evenings with a pencil working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool and comfortable; and she asked me, with the simple inquisitiveness natural to our nation, what I had got in my parcel; and I, glad to stop a moment and get my breath, told her; and she immediately scoffed both at her husband and at the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay up for myself an old age steeped in a dreadful thing called xanthin poison. I went home and consulted the books. The neighbor's wife was right. Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, and Papa, who loves macaroons, chose to disbelieve the neighbor's wife and ate them. But the books are not always so unanimous as they were about this. One exhorted us to eat many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully doing,--for are they not in summer pleasant things?--when I read in another that we might as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, recommended warmly by most books, are discountenanced by two because they make you fat. Rice has shared the same condemnation. Lettuces we may eat, but without the oil that soothes and the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to them you will be thirsty, and you must never drink. An undressed lettuce--a quite naked lettuce--is a very dull thing. Really, I would as soon eat grass. We do refuse at present to follow this cruel advice, and have salad every day in defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that so shall we wean ourselves from the craving for it--'gradually,' as Papa says. Carrots, too, the books warn us against. I forget what it is they do to you that is serious, but the neighbor told me they make your skin shine, and since he told me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. Apples we may eat, but we are not to suppose that they will nourish us; they are useful only for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our insides from coming together. The walls of the vegetarian inside are very apt to come together if the owner strikes out all the things he is warned against from his menu, and then it is, when they are about to do that, that