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Hot breads—comprising griddle-cakes, biscuits, muffins, Sally Lunns and crumpets—may not be wholesome for everybody. I seriously incline to the belief that they are not, especially in warm weather, and if partaken of too freely.

But the best types of these are good, and their appearance upon the board where John had looked for stale bread, or charred toast, is a means of breakfast grace not to be underrated by the wise housewife. She is a canny woman who runs down into the kitchen for ten or fifteen minutes on a stormy morning, or when the bread is especially dry, or John is “a wee bit blue,” and tosses up (always by rule and measure) ingredients that come out of a quick oven, puffy, hot, delicious, to gladden the boys’ hearts and give their father pleasanter food for consideration than business worries. If the men of any family were called upon for their opinion of what a dietetic crank, better versed in anatomy and chemistry than in courtesy, once anathematized at my breakfast table as “rank poison, madam! and nothing short of a sin!” they would say of his tabooed hot breads—“Naughty! but nice!”

One John—who hankers for the buckwheat cakes and sausage of his boyhood as the wanderers in the wilderness, their souls a-weary of manna, lusted for Egyptian flesh-pots—maintains, upon fairly tenable hygienic principles, that warm bread is made unwholesome because it is not masticated properly.

“We chew stale bread,” he says. “We bolt griddle-cakes and muffins because they are soft and easily swallowed. Give the salivary glands a chance to act upon them and they will not harm you.”

The prescription is easily tried.