To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and
be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly
unfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double their
market price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing.
We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce," or even dried
apples. We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he does
not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best. As for
saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and
ubiquitous pickles,--all those things have he, and his fathers before him,
eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listen
incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of
fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.;
for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may
be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having
fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his
wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours
must lie down and rest by noon.
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