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three pound in six bushels; but new flour takes more. can't speak exactly as to alum. Bakers have got their own ideas, and a set of customers that get used to the flavour of their bread. I should use about ten ounces to the sack if I had queer flour given me to make a showy loaf of; but I have used as much as a pound, and nobody has grumbled. Do I think it would be better if people made their own bread? I do; if they could depend on the flour they bought. If they bought it at a commission shop that was served by one of them country millers I was speaking of, they would be no more free from alum than if the baker made their bread. There's an awful lot of fiddling in the flour that the bakers sell. When they scale it into the bags there's an ounce weight always put in to pay for the paper bags, and then lots of 'em will work in a lot of rice-flour and bean meal." The six loaves that were to be tested were obtained from the localities here mentioned-Clerkenwell, Lambeth, Whitechapel, Islington, Westminster, and Bethnal Green. The shops selected were none of them noted for selling cheap bread, but were just the ordinary brisk trade-doing establishments, such as may be found in all populous districts. Each loaf was lettered and delivered to Mr. Broad, of Hornsey Rise, and the following is his report :

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Sir,-All the samples of bread you sent to me on the 17th instant contain alum. 'R,' 0,' 'T,' A,' and 'P,' have clearly been made by adding one ounce of alum to one bushel of flour, equivalent to 28 grains of alum in a 4lb. loaf, for in every 1,000 grains of bread there is an amount of pure alumina (the characteristic constituent of alum), corresponding to three-quarters of a grain of alum. The specimen 'S,' contains just double this quantity of alum.

"The analysis has been confirmed by Professor Attfield. "JOHN BROAD."

Thus it appears, as regards the adulteration of bread, that the testimony of the journeyman baker of forty years' experience remains unimpeached. Only the "regular alum" is used; and though it has elsewhere been shown that sulphate of copper has been detected in the bread which we eat, and on which we mainly feed our children, it does not

possess qualities that justify its universal use in preference to the milder poison. There can be no doubt as to the "regular use "of alum, no doubt that it is a terribly pernicious substance to take into the stomach. "A few grains taken now and then might not do any harm," says Mr. Broad; "but there can be no question that its constant use is extremely hurtful, especially in the case of young and delicate children." Its effect on the digestive organs are pretty much the same as its effects on dough. “It binds,” and consequently induces very mischievous symptoms. Of its reckless use we have ample proof in the fact that one worthy tradesman of the selected six did not scruple to double what appears to be the quantity commonly regarded as sufficient; nor is his iniquity palliated by the strong probability that he was driven to the excessive use of alumina to cover a quantity of flour so vile that it would not pass muster without this amount of doctoring.

This is the ugliest feature of the case. In the manufacture of wholesome bread, there is not the slightest reason why an atom of alum should be used. It is not found in what is known as full-priced bread; it is banished from the premises of the wholesome bread factor. It is only patronised by such bakers as constantly buy and use inferior and damaged flour; and those men, so long as they can conjure into existence something bearing the semblance of good wheaten bread, and, therefore, be able to be sold as such, are troubled with no qualms of conscience about the mode of accomplishing that feat of legerdemain. Unfortunately, as events have proved, this class of baker forms the large majority of those whose daily business is to feed the three millions of our great city.

It is impossible to conceive a more important matter than this mild poisoning of the staff of our existence. There is no avoiding the evil while it is suffered to exist. Aware that tea is covered with poison, either mineral or vegetable, we may avoid tea, and resign ourselves to the simple swindle of chicory and coffee, or we may fall back on the pump, and defy the whole race of cheats who cater for our beverages. We may take alarm at the tricks of the butter trade, and banish the suspected substance from our breakfast table

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But we are helpless in the matter of bread. It is the " lar thing" to use alum; and to avoid Mr. Smith's shop, and transfer your patronage to Mr. Jones on the other side of the street, is only to embark in a blind speculation of alum, more or less. To eat "household bread," as it is commonly called, is to be condemned to take into the system at every mouthful a certain quantity of an article which is antagonistic to the health of the strongest, and which, in the case of the young and delicate, will assuredly tend to weaken the slender threads that hold life together. Such pave the way for the coming, at dusky evening, of that dreadful man who bears a little coffin on his shoulder. You can't, if the journeyman baker is to be believed, escape the machinations of the man of dough. The health-destroyer is in the flour. The "jolly miller," the emblem of all that is hearty and honest the hale, bluff, manly miller, who has so often been eulogised in song-turns out to be but a so-so character, after all. In future there will be no more romance in the clink of the mill than in the clatter of an underground Whitecross sausage machine. Unless the journeyman baker is a malicious. slanderer, the country miller puts alum in the flour, even before it is consigned to the sack that is to convey it to the ordinary place of sophistication-the cellar of the baker. He is Giant Blundabore amongst a wretched race of impecunious bakers. He gobbles up all his profits, legitimate and illegitimate. He will be first robber. He adulterates the flour ready to their hands. He alums it to such a nice extreme, that should the desperate bread-kneader essay to catch a sly shilling or two by the use of a pinch or more of the precious commodity, the jolly miller is sure to bowl him out in less than a week, and his shop is handed over to a more faithful servant.

THE DELIGHTS OF BARNET.

HAD it been the railway station nearest to Donnybrook at the time when the celebrated fair of that district is in full swing, it would not have so much surprised me; but in peaceful England, within twelve miles from Charing Cross, to find the road impeded by a gang of men and lads crying "Who'll buy a stick? Who'll have a ground-ash for a penny? What gen'leman hain't got a stick?" was somewhat amazing. The proposition so earnestly pressed was the more alarming from the aspect of the sticks offered for sale. No make-believe dandy shams, varnished and tasselled were they, but stout twigs of timber in the bark, and wanting only a prog at the end to make them worthy the handling of a bullock drover. "Who'll 'ave a ground-ash? Here yer are, sir! You'll want it." This was by no means what I had bargained for, my mission being one of peace; but the individual who made the last offer accompanied it with a wink so significant that it seemed the extreme of rashness to disregard it. So I bought a ground-ash, and took the road, the dust of which was already dotted all over like a sheep-run with the impressions of other ground-ashes that had gone before.

It was the first day of the Barnet Fair days; but business before pleasure. This was Monday, and the time-honoured, and dearly cherished carnival of the London costermonger was not until Wednesday. There was much business to do in the interval. Between the Whetstone side of Barnet and the common, the meadows were teaming with cattle-little black oxen, old-fashioned and tough-looking, from Wales, and Highland steers, and Devons, and Herefords, and dairy cattle, to say nothing of sheep. But a glance at the enormous crowds that the railway brought to Barnet, made it evident that though nine-tenths meant business, it was not in the sheep and oxen line. There is a solemn deliberation of gait, a slowness of eye, a solemnity of visage about folks who deal

in beef and mutton producing animals, that makes it impossible to confound them with those whose hearts are fixed on horses. There is a smartness, a glibness, a springiness of the legs, in the latter that would as ill fit the former, as tandem harness would a bullock team. The dress of the two is markedly different. The man of bucolic tendencies, has a disposition to be loose in his attire. His ample wide-awake admits of side winds to keep cool his solid, calculating head; there is room to thrust in a hand between his neckerchief and his throat. It doesn't in the least matter if his coat is three sizes too large for him, or that the laces of his boots are slack, even to slovenliness. On the contrary, with a certain class of persons the possession of a horse, a pony, or a donkey -nay, the mere hankering after one-induces a contraction of the habiliments which it seems impossible to resist. Every article of attire must fit as tight on the wearer as the skin of the well-beloved quadruped adheres to its body. His bullet head in his all-round hairy cap fits like a pudding in a basin. He winds lengths of white woollen cloth about his neck, so that it looks like surgical bandaging. His jacket is buttoned tight up, and it is a miracle how he contrives to thrust his enormous feet through the ridiculously narrow legs of his corduroys. Of this sort were the great majority of the merry troopers who tramped over the mile that lies between the railway station and the Fair ground.

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I will have nothing to say respecting the oxen and sheep. I don't know a teg from a wether, and I have not the remotest idea what a full-mouthed stock ewe is like. passed on the road a printed placard testifying that David Jones, from some remote place in Wales, would hold his black cattle market on a piece of land behind some inn; and a little further on, through a gap in the hedge, I saw chalked on a board the mystic inscription, "Cow fair; traps a shillin'." But I had come on purpose to see the horses, and I pushed Presently I obtained a glimpse of them.

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From the main road the horse field at Barnet presents a spectacle to describe which is as difficult as it is at first sight to understand it. I already knew what a horse-market was like a metropolitan market, that is to say-and was prepared to find this one slightly uproarious; but

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