26 
THE RURAI 
NEW-YORKER. 
January 14 
Woman and 
The Home. 
♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦ ♦♦ ♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ 
FROM DAY TO DAY. 
Bust at her work all day, 
Never asks a cent of pay, 
Thinks It ought to be that way. 
Thank the Lord for Susan ! 
Singin’ when she wants to sing, 
Like the robins in the Spring, 
Scoldin’ some like everything. 
Thank the Lord for Susan ! 
Always ready, day or night, 
Always willin’—she’s a sight, 
When it comes to doin’ right. 
Thank the Lord for Susan! 
which demands certain breakfast foods 
and other “ hygienic ” dishes, the direct 
result of fear’s education. 
But cannot the healthfulness or un- 
healthfulness of food articles he accur¬ 
ately stated ? Not,' possibly, excepting 
in the most general way. Why ? Be¬ 
cause every individual is a law unto him¬ 
self ; because, literally, “what is one 
man's meat is another man’s poison.” 
Personal idiosyncrasy counts for more 
than all the dietary arguments in the 
world, and we all of us prove the truth 
of the statement every day we live. For 
instance, stewed tomatoes are consid¬ 
ered indigestible—certainly to be avoid¬ 
ed by dyspeptics—yet the writer knows 
of one person cured of long-standing 
dyspepsia by a cooked-tomato diet. Fried 
onions ought in reason to be tabooed by 
those having delicate stomachs, yet it is 
supposable that there might be cases 
where they would supply a certain need¬ 
ed stimulant or tonicity by reason of 
some personal idiosyncrasy. Bananas 
have generally been considered difficult 
of digestion (we have, perhaps, experi¬ 
enced as much), and we are aghast in 
reading that they are now being success¬ 
fully used as a typhoid-fever diet be¬ 
cause their digestion is completed in the 
stomach. There is not an article of food 
of which it can be said “ it will agree 
with every one,” or one which will not 
be grateful to some stomachs to which it 
has been supposedly impossible. 
There are foods which, judiciously pre¬ 
pared and used, will, in most cases of 
weak digestion, lead one from an invalid 
to a normal diet; but that subject re¬ 
quires separate consideration. 
It is not wise to disregard the consen¬ 
sus of opinion regarding any food arti¬ 
cle, but one should not be bound by 
such opinions. In investigating and 
determining such matters for oneself, 
“thought habit” regarding the article 
should always be discounted; for what¬ 
ever may be claimed or disclaimed re¬ 
garding mental dominance over physical 
conditions, every one knows that the 
stomach at least reflects the emotions, 
and that all the senses connect with its 
functions. 
Me an’ seven childern’s what 
She looks after, well or not, 
And Bhe’s “ mother ” to the lot. 
Thank the Lord for Susan! 
Goes to church on Sundays, too, 
’Long with all she’s got to do. 
It's her that’s goin’ to pull me through. 
Thank the Lord for Susan! 
In her hair Is streaks of gray, 
And the crows’ feet’s come to stay, 
But I like her best that way. 
Thank the Lord for Susan! 
Made of consecrated clay, 
She gits better every day. 
Thank the Lord for Susan! 
— W. J. Lamyton in New York Sun. 
* 
An English advocate of vegetarian 
ideas says that the only way for meat- 
eaters to prevent disease is thoroughly 
to sterilize the meat by heat, in order to 
destroy the poisons. After this dictum, 
the intelligent housewife will continue 
to broil her steaks and chops with the 
additional knowledge that she is steril¬ 
izing them scientifically. But does that 
distinguished vegetarian labor under the 
impression that flesh-eaters devour their 
unsterilized meat raw ? 
* 
Among pensions recently bestowed is 
one of $12 a month to Aunt Lucy Nick- 
ols, a colored woman who served in the 
Twenty-third Indiana Volunteers dur¬ 
ing the Civil War. She was a slave, 
who, with her husband and child, es¬ 
caped from her master, and joined the 
regiment in Tennessee. The husband 
was killed, so the woman shouldered his 
musket, and marched in his stead. The 
woman is now 70 years old, but strong 
and healthy, and she has retained so 
much of her Amazonian spirit that she 
was desirous of enlisting for active ser¬ 
vice during the recent Spanish war. 
HYGIENE IN DIET. 
In the Woman’s Home Companion for 
January, Ella Morris Kretschmar com¬ 
ments on the number of people who are 
now living upon an artificial or restrict¬ 
ed diet. There are scores of magazines 
devoted to dietetic and hygienic subjects 
solely ; culinary magazines, one and all, 
devote part of their space to what one 
may not eat, with elaborate disquisitions 
as to the “why,” contradicting each 
other with delightful frankness and em¬ 
phasis; newspapers rush in with odds 
and ends or whole columns of dietetic 
wisdom to rescue humanity’s stomach ; 
clubs discuss the important topic ; moth¬ 
ers’ societies revel in it; all the world 
talks it over, and ponders it individually 
in private. To what end ? That physi¬ 
cians now have a new disease to deal 
with, a fin de siecle disease—“ food fear.” 
Do you discredit it? Go into a high- 
grade grocer’s and ask to be shown some 
varieties of “ health foods.” If you 
have never had the experience before, 
your amazement would be worth wit¬ 
nessing. Do you suppose a full cata¬ 
logue of “health” articles could be list¬ 
ed on this page ? There are sanitariums 
where patients are fed upon “pre-digest- 
ed” articles—cereals, nuts, milk, etc., 
being the products so prepared; and 
these foods find a market all over the 
country. The pity of it 1 There has 
come to be a certain piety of appetite 
HAROLD FREDERIC 
Harold Frederics Last Story 
THE MARKET-PLACE 
This story has to do with the fortunes of 
a daring speculator, and, incidentally, with 
the corruption existing among the titled 
directors of English Companies. 
It will also interest women, 
telling, as it does, of a well- 
bred society woman, married for 
money to the man of large busi¬ 
ness affairs, and of an ambitious 
business man who marries the 
titled woman for business rea¬ 
sons—that is, for a social posi¬ 
tion, etc.—and, after the experiences usual in 
such cases, these two worldly people realize 
the emptiness of Vanity Fair, and really 
fall in love with each other—a beautiful 
love story in the end—not on usual lines. 
Began December 17 in 
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