would violently fly off at each cut of the hatchet, and lodge on the beds or other unseemly places. I do not favor a dinner of many courses, especially if it falls to my lot to prepare these courses. Few cooks enjoy their own dinners. For two reasons: First--They eat them in anticipation. This nullifies the flavor of the reality. Second--The labor of preparation fatigues the body and takes the keen edge from the appetite. You are heated, flushed, exhausted, and the nerves in a twitter. The expected relish palls and proves a myth. Ladies who cook will corroborate my testimony on this point. It is a great, merciful and useful vent for a woman that a man can come forward able and willing to sympathize with her in regard to this and other trials of domestic life. Having kept my own house for years I know whereof I speak. Two hours’ work about a hot stove exhausts more than four hours’ work out of doors. Americans in Europe are shocked or pretend to be at sight of women doing men’s work in the fields. They are much better off than the American woman, five-sixths of whose life is spent in the kitchen. The outdoor woman shows some blood through the tan on her cheeks. The American kitchen housewife is sallow and bleached out. I have in Vienna seen women mixing mortar and carrying bricks to the sixth story of an unfinished house, and laying bricks, too. These women were bare-legged to the knee, and their arms and legs were muscular. They mixed their mortar with an energy suggestive of fearful consequences to an ordinary man of sedentary occupations. They could with ease have taken such a man and mixed him with their mortar. Coarse, were they? Yes, of course they were. But if I am to choose between a coarse woman, physically speaking, and one hot-housed and enervated to that extent that she cannot walk half a mile in the open air, but requires to be hauled, I choose the coarse-grained fibre.