336 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



apparent extravagance of hiring a cook, at a rate that the 

 salary of few club chefs in London will exceed, it will be 

 expedient and in reality almost economical to engage one for 

 the outfit — that breakfast may be prepared early and the other 

 meals ready punctually at stated times. It does not follow 

 that the gentleman who undertakes this office need be a 

 professor of the art, nor indeed that he need have had much 

 previous acquaintance with it. All that he is called upon to 

 do is to be able to make sour dough bread {i.e., bread, or 

 rolls, always known as biscuits, prepared with sour dough in 

 place of yeast), to fry bacon, and boil beans and coffee. He- 

 will not find his patrons too critical. They sit down, one and 

 all, to eat as if it were the most disagreeable (it certainly 

 sounds anything but a delectable) part of their daily task, race 

 mutely against each other for a finish, then rush off to hew r 

 to dig, or lift heavy logs the moment the last mouthful is 

 swallowed, and the tin plate of each has been duly swobbed 

 clean with his last remnant of bread (this final operation being- 

 quite essential to good breeding, as laid down by Western 

 etiquette). Three times a day is the above frugal fare served 

 up at cattle-ranches during the summer months. In the winter 

 they periodically " kill a beef," as they term it ; and hunks of 

 meat — first parboiled, then roasted, and finally doused with hot 

 water before being placed on the table — are then served up 

 ad nauseam. But the arrival in the country of skilful woman- 

 kind is making a rapid improvement in the system of cooking. 

 Her presence brings with it not only a variety of menu and the 

 introduction of such novelties as potatoes, fruit pies, &c, but 

 makes its humanising influence apparent even on The Boys 

 themselves. Thus, as one may hear it put : " A man can't but 

 notice where there's a woman about an outfit ; The Boys fixes 

 theirselves up, and the place looks that different a man wouldn't 

 know it." 



It must be added of the average Working Man of the West, 

 that in his labour he displays a shrewdness and ingenuity that 

 prove him, even if sparsely educated, to be gifted with con- 



