ONION. 531 
and the Onion is still there ; and when the last one is removed, 
who dare say that the Onion itself is destroyed? though you 
can cry over its departed spirit! If there is any one thing on 
this fallen earth that the angels in heaven weep over more than 
another, it is the Onion. I know that there is supposed to be 
a prejudice against the Onion, but I think there is rather a 
cowardice regarding it. I doubt not that all men and women 
really love the Onion, but few dare to confess their love; the 
affection for it is concealed ; good New Englanders are as shy 
of owning it as they are of talking about religion. Some persons 
have fixed days on which they eat Onions,—what you might 
call ‘ retreats,’ or their ‘Thursdays’; the act is in the nature 
of a mystic ceremony, an Eleusinian rite; not a breath of it 
must get abroad; on that day they see no company ; they 
deny the kiss of greeting to the dearest friend; they retire 
within themselves, and hold communion with one of the most 
pungent and penetrating manifestations of the moral vegetable 
world. Happy is said to be the family which can eat Onions 
together ; they are for the time being separate from the world, 
and have a harmony of aspiration.” ‘‘ Let the reformers then 
become apostles of the Onion: let them eat it, and preach it 
to their fellows, and circulate tracts of it in the form of seeds! 
In the Onion is the hope of universal brotherhood. If all men 
will eat Onions at all times, they will come into a universal 
sympathy.” Again, in the eloquent words of another writer : 
“The fragrance of this wine-scented esculent not only whets 
the appetite, but abounds in associations glad, and picturesque. 
All Italy is in the fine penetrating smell, and all Provence, and 
all Spain. An Onion or garlic-perfumed atmosphere hovers 
alike over the narrow Calli of Venice, the cool Courts of Cordova 
and the thronged Amphitheatre of Naples. It is the only wther 
breathed by the Latin people of the South, so that ever must 
it suggest blue skies, and endless sunshine, cypress groves, and 
olive orchards. For the traveller it is interwoven with memories 
of the golden canvases of Titian, the song of Dante, the music 
of Mascagni. The Violet may not work a sweeter spell, nor the 
Carnation yield a more intoxicating fragrance. Sometimes 
even yet when I enter a London restaurant, however pretentious, 
an aroma arises of the Allium sativum, from a sauce, and I am 
back straightway on the Isle Sainte Marguerite, listening to the 
music of the leaping waves, feasting my eyes on the tempting 
