In spite of our receipts and our philosophy, the briskness of the fire, the skill of our cook, the excellence of the oven, the bright array of pots, kettles, pans, moulds, griddles and gridirons, and the presiding genius of even a half For-tunatus sort of a purse, or the most rigid scale and measure of economy, one grand puzzle besets alike all kitchens-the difficulty of really getting the ingredients on which the mystery of food manufacture is to be exercised.

The very water we have to cook with, is crowded with millions of monsters -things with two heads and no heads, with countless legs and no legs, with jaws and pincers and claws, and most wonderful springy tails; in some water well nigh enough of them to make a sort of soup, to say nothing of the chalk, lime, iron, and a host of other impuri ties.

The sugar, if it be brown, without taking note of such items as a little lead, a good deal of sand, some clay and flour, is pretty nearly as thick as it can hold of chips of cane and swarms of mites.

Our tea, if green, is painted and polished with Prussian blue, turmeric powder, and China clay, and is a mixture of all the leaves that the wonderful industry and ingenuity of the Chinese, can accomplish; we have old tea-leaves dried and twisted up, and colored and glazed, and sold for black and green; we have even gunpowder made up of dust and sand, and gum, faced as they call it with plumbago.

Coffee, fragrant, and refreshing, has almost become a myth; we may have pneumatic coffee-pots that will not let the finest dust pass through their strainers, French coffee-pots, German coffeepots, and all kinds of traditional directions for the manufacture: but not one of them can help us to make coffee, unless as good old Mrs. Glass would say, "we have first got our coffee;" and what with foreign roguery and home roguery the chances are twenty to one against us, that the brown powder we are at so much pains with, once flourished at the end of a blue flower, on a long stalk under our own hedges, being known where it grew under the name of wild endive, christened in trade chicory, and being in reality a tall and aristocratic sort of dandelion, possessing too the medicinal properties of dandelion, and none whatever of the properties of coffee. But even if people be taken with a liking for this dandelion tea instead of coffee, they cannot have it pure. The chicory itself is far too costly to content the avaricious roguery of a number of dealers, and so it is adulterated with roasted corn, parsnips, manglewurzel, beans, Egyptian lupin seed, biscuit powder, burnt sugar, roasted carrots,, oak bark, tan, acorns, mahogany sawdust, and no little sand, the result of the original dirt judiciously left as a make-weight upon the root of the chicory itself.

Mustard can scarcely be said to have even the color of mustard, for it is colored with turmeric, and what passes for mustard is in many a case little more than mere husks and flour.

Pepper is messed up with wheat flour, mustard-seed husks, sago-meal, pea flour, and ware-house sweepings; nor does it fare better with food for invalids, oatmeal being mingled with far less digestive barley-meal at half the price. Arrow-root (which it should be understood is the produce of under-ground branches or bulbs of the maranta plant, growing in the West and East Indies, having gained its name of arrow-root from the belief that it was a remedy against poisoned arrows,) is to the utmost economized; and though its purity is often of great importance to the invalid, there is for the most part sold instead, sago-flour, tapioca-flour, and most commonly of all, potato-starch.

Milk and bread are not so much adulterated. But the milk, partly by the kind of keep of the cows, partly by a little careful skimming, and in a multitude of cases by the liberal aid of the pump, is duly thinned. Flour and bread of old mixed with plaster of Paris, ground bones, and potato-starch - thanks to the cheapening of pure materials, has come to content itself with alum only. But this running account of roguery, except for its curiousness, would be of little use without a few hints, as to partial detection and prevention.

As to tea, it is best to be content with black tea alone.

For sugar, the best advice is - if you like to pay for dirt, and to mix it with your preserves, puddings, and pastry, and choose to believe that sugar which' moistens even the thick paper they place it in, and which looks dark, smells strong, and sticks to your fingers, is richer in sweetening than clear sparkling white sugar, out of which none of the sweetening but all of the dirt has been washed - then buy brown sugar.

"Please tell the people over the way," said a gentleman, "that I would take it as a particular favor, if in future they will send me the cow's hairs on one plate, and the butter on another, and I can mix them myself as I want them." Such is our advice as to coffee. It seems beyond the reach of average human honesty to sell it pure. The chicory is so fragrant - so wholesome - such an improvement on the flavor of the Arabian berry, and withal so much cheaper, that mixed it must be. We say, therefore, Buy your coffee in the berry, raw; your chances are at all events fifty to one better of having coffee only. Roast and grind it for yourselves, and, if you like chicory or dandelion, endive, or any other weed with it, why, buy the roots, scorch them and grate them, and, like the man with the hairs in his butter, mix them to your taste. But do not, unless you choose to cheat your stomachs, buy ground coffee. A mill will soon pay for itself; and at all events never purchase canistered or bottled coffee, for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an additional dose of dust is made to pay for the tin or glass.*

* It may not be amiss to show how tea is made in China, and coffee amongst the Turks.

The art of making tea consists in pouring the water on and off immediately, so as to get the flavor.