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Natchez Meringue

To ornament the top of this, candied and sugared orange peel should be prepared, or green citrou, or preserved water melon-<??>rind. The orange peel first cut into the smallest possible squares is stewed in plenty of water to extract the bitter taste, then stewed in white syrup, then partly dried and rolled in granulated sugar to separate the pieces. Strew this candied peel over the top of meringue after it has become firm without removing it from the oven.

The orange cream. 3 oranges. 1 lemon. 1/2 pound of sugar. 2 1/2 pints of water (5 cups). 3 ounces of corn starch. 1 ounce of butter. 10 yolks of eggs Grate the rinds and squeeze the juice of oranges and lemon into the water, then bring it to a boil, add the starch and sugar and finish as directed for other kinds.

My meal-colored elf, who still is sitting on the dough-trough as before, and converses so well, in a rich Hartz Mountain dialect, would be a delightful companion to wile away a witching midnight hour or two if he were not such an idol breaker. Native of Santa Claus land as he is it would be glorious to sit in the stilly night, when stars are in the quiet skies and the cricket chirrups on the hearth, and hear him tell the weird wild stories of the Black Forest, or the strange but mellowed legends, half told half hinted in the Pilgrims of the Rhine. But his realism is chilling in the extreme and he has no feeling of compunction: "Mephistopheles?" "No, not numerous. Never but one man really saw Mephistopheles, that was Gurthe."

Then I suppose Gurthe is Goethe, and wonder where Sir Walter Scott found the name Gurth for his Saxon swineherd. But, says he, there was no Gurth, no Wamba, no Ivanhoe, and Friar Tuck never had a venison pasty! "But the Hartz Mountains--are they not full of the supernatural?" "Nein. They are full of charcoal-burners, glass-blowers, miners, and people who make childrens' toys." "No headless horesmen who ride past you at night! No white lady of the what's its name mountain pass? No demons that come and tempt wood-choppers to do something? No haunted hotels in the Black Forest? No safes, no annunciators, no elevators?" "Nein" "No phantom herds of deer that vanish into the ground just as the guests on a hunt are about to come up with them? No Metheglin? No were-wolves, no vampires, no dampfnudeln?" "O, yes, there are German dumplings." "Real and sure?" "O, Yes; they are real enough." "'Tis well for the hungry boy who shouts with his sister at play; and well for the sailor lad who sings in his boat on the bay; that this much is solid in Fatherland, and cannot be reasoned away"'.