I lived once with an unbalanced cook. Culinarily he was not self-poised. He lacked judgment. He was always taking too large cooking contracts. He was for a time my partner. He was a lover of good living and willing to work hard for it over a cook stove. He would for a single Sunday’s dinner plan more dishes than his mind could eventually grasp or his hands handle. And when he had exhausted the whole of the limited gastronomical repertoire within our reach he would be suddenly inspired with a troublesome propensity to add hash to the programme. In cooking, as I have said, he lost his balance. His imagination pictured more possibilities than his body had strength to carry out. So busied in getting up a varied meal, he would in a few minutes’ leisure attempt to shave himself or sew on shirt or pantaloon buttons. This put too many irons in the fire. A man who attempts to shave while a pot is boiling over or a roast requiring careful watching is in the oven, will neither shave nor cook well. He will be apt to leave lather where it is not desirable, as he sometimes did. Trousers-buttons are not good in soup. I do not like to see a wet shaving brush near a roast ready to go into the oven. The æsthetic taste repudiates these hints at combination. Then sometimes, in the very crisis of a meal, he became flurried. He rushed about in haste overmuch, with a big spoon in one hand and a giant fork in the other, looking for missing stove-covers and pot-lids, seldom found until the next day, and then in strange places. Nothing is well done which is done in a hurry, especially cooking. Some argue that men and women put their magnetic and sympathetic influences in the food they prepare. If a man kneading bread be in a bad temper he puts bad temper in the bread, and that bad temper goes into the person who eats it. Or if he be dyspeptic he kneads dyspepsia in his dough. It is awful to think what we may be eating. I think the unbalanced cook puts flurries in his stews, for I felt sometimes as if trying to digest a whirlwind after eating this man’s dinners. He ruled the house. I was his assistant. I was his victim. I was the slave of the spit, and the peon of the frying-pan. When his energies culminated and settled on hash, when already the stove-top was full of dishes in preparation, I was selected as the proper person to chop the necessary ingredients. We had neither chopping-knife nor tray. The mining stores then did not contain such luxuries. This to him made no difference. He was a man who rose superior to obstacles, circumstances, and chopping trays. He said that hash could be chopped with a hatchet on a flat board. He planned; I executed. He theorized and invented; I put his inventions in practice. But never successfully could I chop a mass of beef and boiled potatoes with a hatchet on a flat board. The ingredients during the operation would expand and fall over the edge of the board. Or the finer particles