legislative duties, he sold off his stud, one of the
horses which he had just parted with, the
famous Surplice, won the very next Derby.

LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE

CONCERNING PIES.

COLUMBUS discovered a world—granted; but
what is Columbus to the man who first made
a pie? That was a man—that was creative
genius, if you like. That man, that pieman,
left behind him a boundless legacy of good
to future ages. Millions of people are to-day
moulding pies with all the relish of expectant
appetite, and how melancholy to think that
not one of the motley millions knows the
name of the dead benefactor! We should
like, for our own part, to build a city, and
adorn it; in the grand square, an obelisk to
the immortal founder of the pie; in the chief
park, an equestrian statue to the poet who
devised turtle soup; on the chief crescent,
a trophy to the fabricator of the first cutlet.
Every street should be called after a famous
dish or sauce. Your slayers of mankind,
your clever taxers, your shrewd place-hunters,
your cringing courtiers, your incompetent
monarchs, should have no monuments in our
city. But we would immortalise the great
cooks, the captains who circumnavigated the
world to bring home to our firesides new
dishes.

Two pies loom large out of the dimness of
our past experiences. They were and will
always be historical pies to us. The first of
these was a goose pie; it came either from
Yorkshire or Durham. It was a Titanic pie.
It was beautiful to look at, and its seasoning was
inspiration. It was a huge tomb of a pie, with
brown figures exquisite in design (so ran our
boyish mind) as the frieze of the Elgin marbles.
On the raised lid, baked flowers and fruit were
displayed, and the brownest flower of the nosegay
served as a handle to open the pie. Within,
coiled up and sleeping in concentric folds, lay
all the eatable animals of Noah's Ark:—so it
seemed to our hungry and excited vision. Day
after day we came upon fresh strata, differing
in tint and taste, yet all embedded in a
transparent jelly which only genius could have fused
into such a mould. What a conglomerate it
was! The mere catalogue of the contents of
that pie would be a small volume. It was an
edible Chinese puzzle. There were, first and
foremost, two young twin green geese (removed
in the very April time of their sweet youth),
one innocent tucked inside the other—folded,
as it were, in the arms of his bigger brother—
and both embalmed in salt, pepper, mace,
allspice, and an ambery agglutination of jelly. They
were boneless; for so the learned embalmers
had wisely willed it. Then, in a snug and
stately corner, lay a savoury turkey, brooding
over a duck, a fowl, and a small covey of
partridges, mingling and interchanging flavours.
After a whole month's devotion to this pie, breaking
into a bin of forcemeat with fine flavour
of fresh herbs, we dug out (after much labour
and research) the rosy tongue of some
unknown animal. Somewhat later, a hare
rewarded our exertions, hidden in a retired nook
where it had secreted itself with the well-
known cunning of that timid but delicious
creature. That pie was as full of pleasant and
strange surprises as Caliban's island was full
of "sweet sounds" that gave delight and
harmed not.

The second pie was a pigeon pie—a mere
tartlet to the Yorkshire or Durham giant. It
was an innocent little simple pie, of pigeons,
with three stiff legs sticking up in the centre
of the outer crust in a combined suicidal manner,
or like the stalks of an extinct bouquet. It
was a quiet sombre London Sunday morning
when the pie began to be cooked in the oven
of the nearest baker. We were just through
the dark lane of a long fever, and we were
weak, faint, nervous, restless. The family went
to church. The bells ceased. The house grew
deadly quiet. Just then hunger fairly set in and
grew every moment more exacting in its demands.
The leaden-footed hours—how they crawled as
we sat there starving at the window! But we
still remember our delight when the street at
the church end began to darken with coats and
brighten with ribbons. Presently the glum
law stationer, opposite at Number Seven,
returned home with his respectably miserable
family, opened his door and went in, and then
we heard the well-known family voices, and
heard our knocker go; and then the pie—the
pie—arrived from the baker's.

There is an old west country proverb that
"the Devil never ventures west of the Tamar,
for fear he should be put into a pie." There is,
indeed, some warrant for this quaint proverb, for
Devonshire people, either from an innate fondness
for pie, or from a stolid and reckless English
dislike to the trouble of cooking, have a
tendency to put everything under crust. Ling,
conger, shrimps, lobster, rooks, pilchard, leeks,
oysters, turnips, parsley, potatoes—they are
all inurned under the same roof of crust, and
are all indiscriminately devoured. Of all the
west country pies, squab pie is, in our humble
estimation, the most incongruous and the most
detestable. The odious composition is made of
fat clumsy mutton chops, embedded in layers
of sliced apples, shredded onions, and—O
tempora! O mores!—brown sugar! The
result is nausea, unsociability, and, in course
of time, hatred of the whole human race.
The greasy sugary, oniony taste is associated,
in our mind, with the detested name of
Bideford.

Of the fish pies of Cornwall and Devon, what
can we say that is encouraging or satisfactory?
Ling is a sickly unwholesome-looking fish, like
a consumptive cod, and can never thrive—in or
out of a pie. Cod is too dry and tasteless for a
pie. Pilchard pie, mixed with leeks and filled up
with scalded cream, announces its own horrors.
Oyster pie, however, intermingled with slices of