For the artificial tastes with which age tries to make good their loss grow very slowly and cast but a slender shade.
Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their ovens out-of-doors. We saw them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a foundation of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of boards. They looked like little family chapels--and so they were;shrines where the ritual of the good housewife was celebrated, and the gift of daily bread, having been honestly earned, was thankfully received.
At one house we noticed a curious fragment of domestic economy.
Half a pig was suspended over the chimney, and the smoke of the summer fire was turned to account in curing the winter's meat. Iguess the children of that family had a peculiar fondness for the parental roof-tree. We saw them making mud-pies in the road, and imagined that they looked lovingly up at the pendent porker, outlined against the sky,--a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon.
