These may be exceptional cases: I trust they are. But that this state of things does prevail more or less generally, cannot be denied. If, then, the low and trivial matter of eating be sufficiently high and important to take so very prominent a position among our enjoyments, and to seriously affect the peace and happiness of woman’s life, why not harp on it? It should be harped on, likewise, because it affects the condition of almost everybody. Simplify cookery, thus reducing the cost of living, and how many longing individuals, now forbidden, would thereby be enabled to afford themselves the pleasures of culture, of travel, of social intercourse, of tasteful dwellings! And it might be added, at the risk of raising a smile, how many pairs of waiting lovers, now forbidden, would thereby be enabled to marry, and go to--paradise, which is to say housekeeping! Social intercourse, in a special manner, would be affected by the change. People “can’t have company, ’tis such hard work!” And no wonder! A young woman of this village set before her company, the other afternoon, three kinds of cake, two of pie, three of preserves, besides Washington-pie, cookies, and hot and cold bread. Every woman who sat at that tea-table, when her turn of inviting the company comes round, will feel obliged to make a similar display. When this barbarous practice of stuffing one’s guests shall have been abolished, a social gathering will not necessarily imply hard labor and dyspepsia. Perhaps, when that time arrives, we shall be sufficiently civilized to demand pleasures of a higher sort. True, the entertainments will then, in one sense, be more costly, as culture is harder to come by than cake. The profusion of viands now heaped upon the table betrays poverty of the worst sort. Having nothing better to offer, we offer victuals; and this we do with something of that complacent, satisfied air with which some more northern tribes present their tidbits of whale and walrus. When we have changed all this, it will then be given us to know the real pleasure of eating. At present our appetites are so vitiated by over-eating, that the keen edge of this pleasure is dulled. Whoever would enjoy it, sharpened at both edges, let him labor hard enough to feel actual hunger, and then take--why, take any simple thing, a baked potato, a slice of meat, a piece of bread. The dishes that make the work, and cost the money, are usually eaten after hunger is satisfied, and do harm, rather than good.