GOOD ADVICE FOR BREAD-MAKERS.
MR. JOHN MUIR, scientist, geologist, mountaineer, and writer, is on an expedition to the Yukon country. He gives, in an article to the San Francisco Examiner, the following excellent advice on bread and bread-making, which is as good for people elsewhere as in Alaska. He says: "We are all in bondage to bread. If only stomachs could be abolished, how free to wander we would be! . . . "Little or no dependence is to be placed on game by the miner. Nevertheless, most inexperienced travelers carry too much. From nearly every 1,500-pound pack that I saw this summer, at least 500 pounds could have been got rid of as worse than useless. As well put the devil in your pack as a case of yeast powders [baking powder, soda, etc., is evidently meant]. It is in every way a hard case. It leads straight to dyspepsia. It will rub the skin off your shoulders, and eat the skin of your stomach—dissolve or inflame it, as if it were lye, slowly, but surely. Not in a day or week will its deadly work be made manifest, for it works insidiously, like dry rot in trees. "Good bread, on which your climbing and digging depends, may be made direct from the flour-sack, with a little salt and water stirred in. After the dough is worked to the required firmness, squeeze it into thin cakes about the size of ship biscuits, throw them on hot coals raked from the heart of your camp fire, turn them before they begin to burn, and, when firm enough, set them on edge to be toasted until thoroughly baked through. Or, if the weather is bad, or you are camped in a boggy place, cut a stick about the size of a whip handle, of birch, pine, spruce, cottonwood, or willow, according to the flavor desired, and sharpen it, squeeze out a handful of dough, coil it in a thin spiral around the stick, and set it upright in the ground at baking distance from the fire, giving it a quarter turn from time to time, until the bread spiral is thoroughly baked and browned all around. Wholesome bread may be quickly made in this way, in any kind of weather, with the flavor of sunny wheat fields in it, and that of the stick on which it is baked; while the losses from the smearing of pans, and the soggy heart of thick loaves, and dampers, that must be thrown away, are avoided. If you must have your bread old-fashioned and light—bloated into a fluffy mass full of air-holes—then instead of a heavy case of powders take a quarter-ounce cake of baker's compressed yeast to start with, and after each baking put a handful of fermented dough into the flour-sack, and with this store you may go on raising cerealian billows as long as you like."