grates and fire-places. If not cut too thin, if placed at the proper distance from the fire, and continued long enough, care being taken that not a single black, or even dark brown spot, makes its appearance on the surface, the slice of bread may be toasted through and through; and it is this operation which makes properly toasted bread so much more wholesome than bread which is not toasted, and still more preferable to bread burned on the surface and sodden in the interior. By this means the whole of the water may be drawn out of it, and it may be changed from dough, which has always a tendency to undergo the acetous fermentation in the stomach, to the pure farina of wheat, which is in itself one of the most wholesome species of food we have, not only for the strong and healthy, but more particularly so for the delicate and diseased. As it is turned to pure farina, the tough and gluey nature is gone, every part can be penetrated, all parts are equally warm, and no part is so warm as to turn the butter into oil, which, even in the case of the best butter is invariably turning a wholesome substance into an injurious substance. There is another circumstance regarding the buttering of a rightly toasted slice. The dough, being a compound of water, repels the butter, which is an oil; but the dried farina allows the butter to penetrate the whole slice equally through. There is more advantage in this than some may suppose. Butter in masses (whatever may be its quality) is too heavy for the stomach; though butter divided with sufficient minuteness, and not suffered to pass into an oil, makes a most valuable addition to many kinds of food. The properly toasted bread absorbs the butter, but does not convert it to oil: and both butter and farina are in a state of very minute division, the one serving to expose the other to the free action of gastric fluid in the stomach; and that this fluid shall be able to penetrate the whole mass of the food, and act upon it in small portions, is the grand secret of healthful digestion; so that when a slice of toast is rightly prepared, there is, perhaps, not a lighter article in the whole vocabulary of cookery. Unfermented brown bread, treated in this way, forms an excellent substitute for biscuits, and is in some respects superior, as it may be eaten with impunity by those persons with whom biscuits may disagree. SUGGESTIONS TO HOUSEKEEPERS.