Salmon is as nice when it is a shilling a pound as when it is four times that price, and venison is by no means an expensive viand if the market be watched. If we only think of ribs of beef and legs of mutton, we shall only get beef and mutton. But if we take Nature for our guide, we need not deny ourselves the most gratifying and healthful variety. It is essential that we should eat the fresh fruits as they are ripe, and this rule is equally necessary as regards vegetables. Indeed, in summer we should accustom ourselves to think more of the vegetable food than of meat; to arrange our dinner in this department primarily, considering what dainty dishes we may concoct of flour and vegetables fried, boiled, and baked, dressed with oil or milk, herbs or spices, incidentally adding the meat--in fact, reversing our usual order of proceedings, where we construct our dinner plan of solid meat, only throwing in vegetables or fruit by way of garnish. But what I wish to dwell on now is not so much the quantity of vegetable produce we ought to consume, as the necessity of its seasonableness. When our cooks, be they noble, gentle, or simple, have come to study the medicinal properties of plants--how they act upon the different organs of the body, and so on--they will see how beautifully they are adapted by the great Provider to our bodily requirements, according to the weather and other circumstances, and how often what grows best in any situation or soil is the aliment best suited to our own growth in that situation. If we attended more to this point, our digestions would have sufficiently varied exercise to keep them in healthy working order, and we should hear less about what does or does not agree with people. It is of more consequence that our digestions should be permitted to work at regular hours, than that they should have an over-easy diet. This, indeed, is absolutely injurious to them. Persons sometimes feel ill, and whatever they may happen to have fed upon is loaded with the responsibility, and that article of diet is cut off for ever from their list, and its hygienic benefit lost to the constitution. The blame is never laid on irregularity, want of air, exercise, or occupation, excitement or perhaps temper, or upon circumstances generally. Either the weather or the food, irrespective of the quantity taken, is charged with every ill. If we took care to make pictures of our dishes of fruit, they would afford us two delightful sensations instead of one. To do this it is not needful to have heaps of fruits, or pyramids of pines. A plum on a leaf, an orange on a china tile, with a branch of flowers laid across it, make exquisite pictures.