Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

London shops are now full of sun-dried American fruits, principally apples and apricots. These appear to me to be safer and wholesomer, particularly for children, than tinned or bottled fruit. If carefully carried out, the following receipt makes them excellent : — Select the fruit you intend to use, and rinse it thoroughly in clear, fresh water; then place it in a dish with sufficient water to cover it, and allow it to soak for ten or fifteen hours before it is required for use. After this, put it in the vessel in which it is to be cooked (which ought, of course, to be earthenware), simmer it slowly, letting it come just once in a way to the boil, until it is thoroughly cooked. If the water in which the fruit was soaked is thrown away, and fresh water substituted, much of the flavour and nutriment of the fruit will be lost. Sufficient sugar should be added, when the fruit is nearly done, to make it palatable. Dried fruit cooked in this way can be served either hot or cold, as may be desired. As a rule, when allowed to cool, it will be fully as palatable as if eaten warm. By cooking dried fruit according to this method, there will be secured a wholesome and palatable dish, full flavoured, and resembling as near as possible, in appearance, size, and taste, the original fresh product. This also is good : — Bavarois of fruit, bottled or fresh. Warm the fruit and rub it through a hair sieve, and add just enough isinglass, previously melted in a little water, to set the fruit when cold. Add some cream, and pour into a mould, keeping back a little fruit to make a syrup, which should be poured round before serving. Icing improves the dish. 257 SONS Boys and girls — The health question — Early independence — Public schools — Influence of parents — The management of money — Family life and its difficulties— Sir Henry Taylor — ' Mothers and Sons ' — The feeding of children — The abuse of athletics— Success in life — Spartan upbringing — Youth and age. I FEEL sure you all, as my nieces, care enough for my views on most things to wish for a few remarks on the great question of how to bring up boys and girls. The opinion of anybody who has thought at all and who has lived a long life is worth having as the personal ex- perience of one individual. Age is to life what distance is to landscape, it makes all things assume fairer pro- portions and embrace a larger horizon. We see more plainly the good and the bad in alt systems, any con- victions we may still have we hold conditionally, and we lose the confidence with which we stepped out when we knew less and felt more. I had better begin first with the boys, and speak of the girls later on, which is certainly dealing with the matter in the old, conventional way. It is a well-known fact that more boys are born into the world than girls, but they are more difficult to rear, which accounts for the greater preponderance of women in the end. 1 suppose I ought to have more to say about boys than girls, for, as you know, I have had only boys of my own. My mother used to say it was a merciful 258 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN interposition of Providence that I had no girls, as I was totally unfit to bring them up. Naturally I do not agree with this, and should have liked immensely to have had three girls as well as three boys.