BREAD. 
67 
even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet 
as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I 
have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several 
accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca olera- 
cea ) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. 
I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the 
trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable 
man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a 
sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, 
with the addition of salt ? Even the little variety which 
I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and 
not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that 
they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but 
for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who 
thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drink¬ 
ing water only. 
The reader will perceive that I am treating the sub¬ 
ject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of 
view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness 
to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. 
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, 
genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of 
doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed 
off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked 
and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have 
at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most 
convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no 
little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in 
succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an 
Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal 
fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a 
fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in 
as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made 
