The success of this scheme depends wholly
upon the manner in which it is carried out.
It removes the difficulty of finding means and
materials for training pupils in national
schools, to become good cooks, and it provides
a market for the produce of their skill. As
it should be looked upon as a mission-house
for cooks, the doctrines taught in this culinary
academy must be sound, and the
practicable results profitable; or failure will be
inevitable. The few who may be its customers
will not excuse bad cooking, or ill-chosen
raw-material, from an establishment
which professes to be a model; and unless,
eventually, it become even more than
self-supporting, bad economy will be suspected,
—the very worst trait in the character
of any cook, whether she be of the class
"good plain " or the class " professed."

THE RINDERPEST; OR, STEPPE
MURRAIN.

MAN, whether savage or civilised, whether
clad in broadcloth and dwelling at Clapham,
or naked and wandering over the wilds of
Australia, dotes on gossip, and demands and
obtains a supply of horrors.

No traveller has ever wandered into a
savage country but there have been a hundred
reports among the tribes through which
he has passed, of his death by violence.
Every African traveller has, according to
Sir E. Murchison's authority, thus died many
deaths. More than once, a friend of ours, a
colonist in the bush, has been surprised by a
visit at a gallop from friends with spades, who,
on the information of an old black woman,
have arrived to bury him, but who have
remained to dine. Every season the town is
agitated by the reported death by drowning,
or railroad accident, or foreign banditti, of
some distinguished character. On a larger
scale are the rumours of earthquakes, comets,
plagues, pestilence, and famine, which
formerly frightened good people out of their
senses, and sent town citizens, in Horace
Walpole's time, to encamp in the country.
Now, they do nothing more than alarm old
women, and generate a swarm of pamphlets
and newspaper paragraphs. We have had
within our times some real terrors. We have
had the cholera twice, and the influenza,
which, on its first advent, killed more than
the cholera. We have had the potato-rot
and short harvest, more fatal in its effects
than any epidemic or contagious disease,
although my worthy agricultural friend and
fossil protectionist, Brittle, of Essex, still
maintains that the Irish famine was a political
device concocted between Sir Robert Peel
and Mr. Cobden. More recently we have had
the panic created by the Californian and
Australian gold diggings, when stout gentlemen,
large holders of three per-cents., gravely
deplored the coming time when the Chancellor
of the Exchequer would pay them off with
worthless sovereigns, of no more value than
the shankless buttons with which ragged
boys play at chuckfarthing.

The two last favourite future terrors and
horrors have been the comet and the cattle
murrain; the comet has been the peculiar
perquisite of the more ignorant of the
Stiggins fraternity, while the doctors have
have had the monopoly of the talk about
cattle murrain.

The comet terror has passed away, to
be renewed at some convenient opportunity.
The cattle murrain mania, with which was
allied the diseased meat mania, has just
been put at rest, or in a fair way extinguished,
by the same means that created it;
that is to say, by the facilities of railway
travelling and the news-diffusing powers of
the press.

Ever since common-sense triumphed, and
Englishmen wlio send what they manufacture
all over the world, were permitted to
buy food, alive or dead, wherever they could
get it cheapest, we have been doing a large
business in foreign live-stock. They come to
Hull. They come chiefly from Spain and
Portugal, to Liverpool and Southampton;
and they come by hundreds and even
thousands a-week to London from the Baltic and
northern ports, from Belgium, and by exception
from France. The importation does not
increase at present. At first it rose rapidly,
until it reached some seventy thousand
a-year. It has since declined to about fifty
thousand. For, after we had exhausted the
surplus stock of working oxen that our
continental neighbours had on hand (their
fortunes made out of Spanish bullocks); after
we had raised the price of meat all over
Europe, from the Elbe to the Danube, from
the Scheldt to the Garonne, and for ever
extinguished those mountains of beef at two-
per pound, which used to disturb the
rest of our hardacred and ungeographical
baronets and squires between Norfolk and
Devonshire; after we had compelled France,
in self-defence, to permit what French
protectionist journalists called "the fatal
invasion of foreign beasts;" our supplies of
continental beef and mutton fell off, with no
chance of increase until Russian, Spanish,
and Portuguese railroads shall open up fresh
fields and pastures new.

Nevertheless, the supply of foreign cattle
to Islington market was, in eighteen hundred
and fifty-five and eighteen hundred and
fifty-six, nearly one-fourth of the whole
weekly sale, when there came a succession of
despatches from our foreign consuls, and even
ambassadors, announcing that the close of
the Russian war had left behind, a truly
Russian cattle disease—the rinderpest or
steppe murrain—more fatal and contagious
than anything hitherto known in England.
These despatches, in which three or four
different diseases were mingled in one
frightful description, followed each other so