of that, longshoremen in Canadian coast villages feed. The fattest of fat pork, potatoes, and salt cod seem to be the staple food in the coasters, and as often as not "coffee" is made with burnt bread, and sweetened with exceedingly dubious molasses. Lying in a Nova Scotian harbour once, loading lumber from a large schooner, I went on board at breakfast time. I found the skipper preparing breakfast for all hands--four of them. They did not muster a cook. He unearthed a mass of cold cooked potatoes and a block of pale pink fat, got out a big square tin, which he put on top of the hot stove, and, carving up the lump of fat into dice, sprinkled them over the bottom of the pan. He then peeled his potatoes, and dropped them into the pan on top of the hissing fat, stirring them round with his knife. As soon as the mass was warm through, breakfast was ready. The "coffee" was warmed up from yesterday, and its aroma was enough to kill a mosquito. I should think it would have made a fine disinfectant. Yet in that splendid country there is no want of the best food. There is a serious lack of cooking ability. I stayed in a "hotel" in one coast village for nearly two months one winter, where at least thirty always sat down to meals. Those meals never varied. Fried blocks of meat, potatoes boiled in their skins, soggy bread, and "pies," a sort of stew of cranberries or dried apples, spread over a dough-covered plate, and indurated in an oven, always formed the menu: never a bit of green vegetable, or any suggestion that even the same kind of meat might be made just as palatable, if not more so, by being treated in a different kind of way. I suppose these strong men look down with a certain contempt upon any careful treatment of food as being effeminate.