Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/607

Rh with home-made plum-cake, or marmalade or honey. Whenever procurable, some salad-herb, such as lettuce, radish, etc., is given at this meal, and always eaten with much relish.

Supper at 8 (for senior boys only).—Bread-and-butter, or bread-and-cheese, or biscuit, or, where it may seem needed, a tumbler of milk, or glass of beer and a meat sandwich.

No hampers of eatables are allowed to be sent to the boys from their friends, and no shop for the sale of sweets, etc., is allowed or accessible to the boys.

This dietary seems to me so exactly what growing boys or girls ought to have, and so often what they do not get, even at their own homes, that it may appropriately serve as the text for a few remarks on the usual dietaries of public and private schools. I will begin by at once stating my belief—as one who was himself at a private and a public school, and who still sees a good deal of school-boys—that either in quality, quantity, variety, or frequency of meals, the dietary of nearly every school I have known is more or less defective.

The usually unvaried breakfast of tea or coffee (and these fluids too often of a miserably thin description), with bread-and-butter, is a meagre meal for a boy who has to break a twelve-hours' fast. It is not enough for the robust, nor varied enough for the delicate. A good basin of bread-and-milk, or milk-porridge, should always be allowed as a substitute for tea or coffee; and the latter, when preferred, should always be accompanied with some little extra, such as a bit of cold meat, or bacon, or an egg—sometimes one, sometimes the other, so as to secure the utmost possible variety. Coffee, by-the-way, should be of good quality, strong enough to require copious dilution with milk, and not the sloppy decoction of brown paper which it too often resembles in taste, appearance, and nutritive value.

Nearly all boys want something between breakfast and dinner, about 11 o'clock; and if this something be not provided for them in a wholesome form by the school-master, they will seek to get it, probably in a much less wholesome form, at the school "shop," or in the contents of the "hamper from home." Concerning these two venerable institutions more shall be said presently.

Meat or other food of bad quality is hardly ever put on the table nowadays in any decent school. Equally rare is any stint in its allowance. The fault of most school dinners is roughness in the cooking and serving, insufficient variety in the form and kind of meat and vegetables, and the too frequent absence of puddings. It will be seen by the above dietary that, with very little strain of culinary arrangements, meat may be served up in half a dozen different forms each week, and, if two kinds of it always come to table, ample variety will have been attained. Variety in food is no mere luxury or pampering of appetite. In all cases desirable, in the case of growing boys it is highly so; while in the case of boys with delicate or capricious