The luxury of a good garden can hardly be appreciated till you have been in possession of one, more especially where there are many children.  The way we used to preserve currants, gooseberries, plums, damsons, and, indeed, almost every description of fruit, was this:  The wide-mouth bottles which are sold for the purpose were filled with fruit, six ounces of powdered loaf-sugar was shaken in among it; the bottles were then tied down as closely as possible with bladder, and placed up to the neck in a copper, or large saucepan, of cold water, which was allowed to come slowly to the boil.  They remained in it till the water was quite cold, when they were taken from the water and wiped quite dry.  Before placing them in the store-room the bottle was turned upside down, in order to see that they were perfectly air-tight, for on this depends the fruit keeping good.  The fruit will sink down to about the middle of the bottle, and we once tried to fill them up with some from another, but opening them admitted the air, and the contents did not keep well.  If properly done, they will be good at the end of a year.

If any lady undertake the management of a four-acre farm, she must expect it to occupy a great deal of her time; if she leaves it to servants, however honest, she will lose by it.  It is not that things are stolen, but that they are wasted, unless the mistress herself knows what quantities of barley, oats, etc., her poultry and pigs consume; and unless she look daily into her dairy and see that the mild is well skimmed, half the cream will be thrown into the wash-tub.

A six-months’ longer experience of the country only confirmed my sister and myself in the conviction that we had in every way made a most desirable change when we quitted London for our small farm; but if we had been too fine or too indolent to look after our dairy and poultry-yard, I believe that our milk, butter, eggs, poultry, and pork, would have cost us quite as much as we could have purchased them for in town.

All the good things we were daily consuming in the country would have come to us in London,

“Like angels’ visits, few and far between.”

I know that many of our old friends were really shocked when we told them, laughingly, of our new pursuits, and that the butter they so much praised, and the apricot-cheese they ate with so much gust, were manufactured by our own hands.  We were “poor-thinged” to our faces in a very pitying manner, but we always laughed at these compassionate people, and endeavored to convince them we spoke the truth in sober earnest, when we assured them we found great amusement in our new pursuits.  They shook their heads and sighed in such a manner, that we knew perfectly well that, as soon as we were out of ear-shot, they would say, “Poor things!  It is very sad, but they are quite right to try and make the best of it.”  I believe some of them thought that it was impossible we could have “souls above butter;” for a lady who called one day, taking up one of Mudie’s volumes from the table, said,—­