Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/31

8 an American servant, the best cook that ever suggested the Physiologie du Goût. "When I forget, O Roxana! thy clear soups, light bread, and delicate desserts, thy coffee, better than any I have drunk in Paris; when I am ungrateful for thy broiled birds and thy superb treatment of venison —

when I forget thy cookery, O Roxana! may I be condemned to eat sawdust all my days!

From the amount of sawdust and bad cookery which I have eaten I might consider myself punished for ingratitude; but no! there was never such a cook as Roxana!

The physical conditions of my bringing-up were eminently healthy. The good and plentiful table, the splendid, exhilarating air, the exercise on horseback, the line sleigh-rides in an immense gilded structure called "The Sleigh," which my father had had built for his own long limbs, and to accommodate a large family and all the neighbors — a sleigh which reminded one of St. Petersburg — the fascinating summers and autumns, with the picnics and the walks and excursions in that prettiest and most finished valley which surrounds Iveene (worthy of its English-named county, Cheshire); with Monadnock, a stone mountain, shaped like Vesuvius, which Nature dropped from her apron as she was going up to make the White Mountains; those pine woods, as ample as the Pineta of Ravenna; the soft hills wooded to the top; the wide, fertile, and picturesque meadows; the slow and sluggish current of the Ashuelot, winding among the drooping willows and stately elms — afforded days for the pleasures of budding girlhood which were