No domestic
articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily
take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence
the infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has
late in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding
one which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table.
A matter for despair as regards bad butter is, that at the tables where
it is used it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every
other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread,
which fills your mouth with bitterness, to-your beef-steak, which
proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in
vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting
the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, hi the succotash, in
the squash; the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them.
Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself at the dessert; but
the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague. You are
ready to howl with despair, and your misery is great upon
you--especially if this is a table where you have taken board for three
months with your delicate wife and four small children.
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