A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 157 



bread or the mustard. All this holds good, mutatis 

 mutandis, of every sort of market vegetable and 

 fruit early potatoes, strawberries, lettuces, cucum- 

 bers, "greens." Fed on American pith and cotton- 

 wool, the public hardly knows the taste of a right 

 English pippin or pearmain : anything light, dry, 

 insipid, will serve for the market, so it be fairly large 

 and has a showy skin. And in course of time the 

 thing of generous juices and sound fibres becomes not 

 only neglected, but positively distasteful : just as Miss 

 Cottingham finds our sweet cream-coloured butter 

 naught, while she remembers the salt material of 

 middle-chrome hue found at prudent studio-teas ; and 

 as inland folk visiting a fishing-village miss some 

 added customary tang in their fresh-caught sole or 

 whiting ; as Bish turned the other day from the fill 

 of very choice Turkish I gave him, back to the dark- 

 hued abomination of fiery stench which he gets of 

 Mis' Bennett, and smokes in a short, saturated clay. 



In the matter of garden stuff the British people, 

 save some of the wealthier who can be upsides with 

 their own gardeners, some cottagers of finer strain 

 than the common, and some wise amateurs like myself, 

 are quite ignorant of what is good to eat. "No 

 garden like Covent Garden," says the Cockney ; not 

 knowing that if nothing else came between, in the way 



