N a certain breezy hill overlooking a little city,* a meadowed valley, and the winding of an Indian-christened river, there stands a peculiar residence. This word "residence" ought, perhaps, to be converted into a species of collective noun, so vast is the family it shelters and so remarkable its domestic arrangements. It is an abode where, under the protective folds of our Stars and Stripes, Uncle Sam does the marketing and the Goddess of Liberty keeps house. In the archives at Washington this institution is known as the Central Branch of the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, but that is merely official and does not express anything. To its friends and habitués it is known as "The Home," and such it is in almost every sense of that comprehensive word. Here between four and five thousand of the soldiers who defended the Union in the late war are fed, lodged, clothed, taught, nursed and amused at the expense of the Government. The Soldiers' Home is really a miniature city, and for the maintenance of its family is needed not one large building nor twenty, but whole streets of them, branching out in all directions, and crowning the hill like a diadem.

Would not a pen-and-ink peep into this place be interesting?

Suppose then, we enter at the north gate of the Home, or we will say the front-door of the residence. We pass into an enclosure six hundred acres in extent, beautifully gardened and graded, crossed by broad avenues and shaded by forest trees. To our right stands the Hospital. Just before us are the ivy-grown chapel, Memorial Hall and the hotel, and beyond lie gardens and lakes, the pretty homes of the officers, and then a vanishing perspective of brick barracks. With all these, nowever, we have nothing to do in this paper, as they belong to the social

* Dayton, Ohio.

and official rather than to the domestic interests of the Home.

The pivot on which an ordinary household turns is the kitchen. This may not be a fact that it flatters our souls to acknowledge, but it seems to be universally true. As we eat, so accordingly do we sleep, converse, manage our children, write poetry and do works of charity. Let us then look into the back premises, as it were, of Government housekeeping, and see how the Goddess manages her household when she is not sitting in a brown study on a gold dollar. On one of these shady avenues, opposite a long row of brick barracks (by no means as ugly as the name implies), stands a three-story brick building, with a pillared portico along the front. This building contains the two dining-halls, on the first and second floors respectively, each 90 by 130 feet, together comprising an area exceeding half an acre. In the rear of this is the kitchen, a large, irregular apartment, lighted from the sides and from above, and with floor-space enough to accommodate a mass meeting.

The bakery, bread-room, dish department and refrigerator are also under this roof. No pantry is necessary, as the food is kept in separate rooms, shelved to the ceiling to hold each day's portion.

The Goddess is a thrifty housewife, and starts the domestic machinery at three o'clock in the morning. At that hour the kitchen and dining-room are opened and aired, the steam turned on in the range, and the regiment of help begins the day's work. Breakfast is served at six. An average of four thousand men are fed three times a day from the general kitchen, and from four to five hundred at the Hospital. Imagine the work necessary to prepare a Friday breakfast, with seven barrels of mackerel, fifty-four bushels of potatoes, and five hundred and sixty gallons of coffee to be cooked and served promptly at six. A certain amount of confusion might be excusable in the preparation of so monstrous a meal as this; but, beyond the clatter of tin and stone ware and the tramp of many feet,

there is astonishingly little. Each man knows his place and his duty, and never strays from either. There are thirty men in the kitchen department under the direction of the chief cook and his assistant. Some prepare vegetables, others cut the meat and the bread, still others make the coffee. They do not interfere with one another, nor do they waste time, or labor, or food. There are no grease spots on the floor, no unwashed cooking utensils, no (visible) dishcloths. It is the true military order and neatness which admits nothing short of perfection. This perfect state led me to accuse the head cook and his right-hand man of being gentlemen of leisure, as my frequent visits to the kitchen invariably disclosed them leaning in nonchalant attitudes against a table. I furthermore expressed the wish that my family of five gave me as little concern as did theirs of five thousand.

"Ah, you should see us at five o'clock in the morning," the head-cook said with a look intended to convey the fact that at that hour they were very far from being gentlemen of leisure, whatever attitudinizing they might indulge in later in the day.

Across one end of the kitchen is a range, twenty feet long. This is used exclusively for cooking meats, and the quantity of roast beef for one dinner, about twenty hundred-weight, or nearly three entire beeves, is easily accommodated. The cavernous fireplaces exhibited to tourists in the feudal castles of the old world and declared large enough to roast an ox whole, make a more imposing show as to size, but in the matter of practical utility they must give way to the superior merits of the Soldiers' Home range. One side of the kitchen is lined with huge iron pots or coppers, heated by steam, for cooking vegetables. On the opposite side is a row of stationary coffee-boilers, seven in number, each holding from sixty to a hundred gallons, and all filled and emptied twice a day the year through. Here is the way coffee is made at the Soldiers' Home: First the boilers are filled with water, and the steam turned on under them. Then, while the water is heating, the ground coffee is measured out of the bins and put into perforated tin receptacles, the shape and size of washtubs, one of which fits into each copper. This is on the principle of the French coffee-pot which requires no egg for the

clearing. A bucketful of brown sugar, more or less, and a sufficient quantity of milk are then emptied into each copper, so that the coffee when boiled is ready for the table. At a signal the waiters file into the kitchen, one behind the other, each armed with as many tin coffee-pots as he can carry. Very rapidly the faucets are opened, the coffee-pots filled; and in perfect order the procession marches back to the dining-hall, to distribute its beverage among the many tables. When this achievement has been repeated often enough to fill four thousand bowls, the coffee grounds are hoisted out by pulleys and emptied, the coppers cleaned, the floor wiped up, and everything is in readiness for the next meal.

The hash machine keeps company with the coffee-boilers on the same side of the kitchen, and is run by a four horse-power engine. This machine has in addition to the usual bewildering number of cogwheels and levers, five sharp blades which work very quickly in a shallow revolving cylinder containing the hash. Saturday is the day set apart for this dish so celebrated in boarding-house lore; and nine hundred pounds of corned beef and thirty bushels of potatoes are required to make the morning meal. The chopping is done Friday afternoon, and it takes three men and the above-mentioned machine forty-five minutes to turn out the necessary amount.

Mashed potatoes are served twice a week, and the routine is the same. Two men ladle the hot potatoes from the boilers into a tub; five others stand about, and belabor its contents resoundingly with wooden mashers almost as tall as themselves. When the potatoes in this tub have been crushed sufficiently, it is removed by men who swing another into its place, and the ladling and pounding are resumed. Fifteen times this process is repeated, before there are enough mashed potatoes for dinner.

All the eatables for this family are supplied on the same gigantic scale. A statement of the quantity of food required at the Home has a Falstaffian ring which might well make a prudent chronicler hesitate unless supported by official figures. Forty-five pounds of tea every night for supper! "Sir," said a skeptical old lady on hearing this,

"I buy a quarter of a pound of tea and it lasts me a whole week."

Seventy-five gallons of milk are used each day at the general kitchen, and as much more at the Hospital. Seven hundred gallons of Irish stew are prepared for breakfast once a week. Strawberries and eggs are rarities on the Government table, but when they are put on the bill of fare it requires twenty-five bushels of the first and twelve hundred dozen of the last to meet the demand. One visitor remarked that it was no wonder eggs were expensive in Dayton since all the hens in the Miami Valley must contribute to the observance of Easter Sunday at the Soldiers' Home.

Forty sheep are taken from the slaughter houses to the range on each day that mutton potpie is served; and eighteen barrels of flour are baked into bread and consumed every twenty-four hours. This reminds me of the bakery, which naturally fills an important rôle in the government ménage. A large room redolent with odors of fresh bread, pies and cinnamon cake, forms a vestibule, one might almost say, to the vast Ovens which open into it. At the time of my visit it contained, as principal furniture, a long table completely covered with very appetizing pies. The baker informed me that the whole number for one day's dinner (of which but a small proportion was to be seen) required twelve barrels of apples for the filling, three tubs of butter.for the upper and three tubs of lard for the lower crust. I said I should like to see the process of pie-making. "Well, Madame," said a floury personage, presumably the head baker, "you will have to take a pretty early start. The men heat up the ovens at midnight, and begin filling the pans at one o'clock. You see they have twelve hundred pies to make before five o'clock when the ovens must be ready for the bread." I concluded to leave the piemaking to my imagination and take the word of the soldiers on the subject.

Twenty rolling-pins hung in a rack against the wall. Being prepared almost for anything, I should not have been surprised to hear that they rolled their piecrust out by the acre with a giant rolling-pin, like a lawn-mower, and run by horse-power; I found, however, that

An adjoining room is filled with flour barrels, wooden troughs, molding boards and all the paraphernalia of bread making, including the steam dough-mixer, a machine run by the same little engine that furnishes power for the hash-chopper. An iron trough, ten feet long and half as deep, is ar ranged so that it may be tilted to receive the dough. Running through the bottom from end to end is an axle with six revolving arms or blades, resembling the screw of an ocean steamer. Three of these paddles revolve one way and three the other, thus working the dough to one end of the trough and back again, no doubt doing as thorough service as a pair of stout Irish arms in a family baking. Twenty minutes are sufficient for the kneading of a batch of dough requiring six barrels of flour. The ovens hold one hundred and twenty-six pans of ten loaves each. Ginger-bread is furnished once a week, when an area of four hundred square feet is baked.

The dining-room, or mess-hall, as you must call it if you would be truly military, is a well-lighted apartment, with long vistas of wooden tables, white and smooth from daily scrubbing, and like all the appointments of this household, clean enough to cheer the soul of the typical New England housewife. On the second floor is another room similarly fitted up. The tables in each room accommodate at one sitting eleven hundred men, but as that is but about one-fourth of the actual number to be fed, they have to be filled twice at each meal. A short time before the dinner-hour all is quiet and orderly, the stools in rows and the tables empty, except for the salt and pepper standing guard in the middle of each. A few men lounge idly about, and one cannot help thinking they must have forgotten that four thousand hungry veterans will besiege the doors at twelve o'clock. Suddenly a bell rings. You notice that a small army, two hundred and thirteen, in fact, has gathered in the passage-way from the kitchen. Each man carries a tower of plates and, as the signal sounds, they begin to march down the centre aisle and file off between the tables, distributing the heavy

The seating of the first two thousand men occupies just five minutes. When this is done, the sergeant gives the order to "Fall in for meat" or "potatoes," as the case may be. Twenty minutes are allowed for eating, though the men are never hurried in their meals. At the end of that time another bell rings, the men pass out of the hall; and twenty minutes more are allowed for clearing the tables and setting them again. It seems incredible that this can be done in so short a time, but as I have watched the men I know it can. The first squad of waiters dash deftly in with wooden trays, on which they collect all the bits of bread. They are followed by those who remove the knives and forks; then by those who empty the dregs of coffee into buckets. Another row of waiters pile up the plates, and stand waiting for the signal to start. When these have vanished there are others behind them, whose duty it is to brush off the crumbs and place the clean dishes on in the order I have described before. After the second set of men have finished their dinner and left the hall, the tables and floor are scrubbed, and everything is once more in order.

Just off the mess-hall is a room devoted to dishwashing. It is filled with plate-laden shelves running to the ceiling, and in the middle is a row of zinclined tubs with hot-water pipes and faucets. The celerity with which nearly ten thousand dishes pass through the dish-water and back to their places is marvelous. They are all, however, more or less nicked, as a result of this lightning process, and no private housekeeper will find this surprising. The dish-washing, like the table-setting, is conducted with military precision. The thirty men with arms full of bowls cannot pass into the dish-room until the bell announces that the other thirty men with the plates have left. If they should meet once through a mistake in the signal, I judge the effect would be something like Chickamauga.

Framed upon the dining-room wall is

Breakfast-Salt mackerel or white fish, potatoes, bread, butter, coffee.

Dinner - Stewed codfish

with egg sauce, turnips,

bread, butter, coffee.

Supper-Stewed prunes, cinnamon cake, bread, cheese, tea.

Other days in the week show a corresponding variety of food, all excellent. The order is changed to suit every season. On Christmas Day the warriors are treated to four hundred turkeys, seven barrels of cranberry sauce, twelve hundred mince-pies, and oranges, celery, oysters and other delicacies in proportion. It may be interesting to know what this wholesale provisioning costs the Government. The total amount paid out for food in the quarter ending December 31, 1887, was $87,085.08, or an average cost per man of 20 cents a day. This includes the wages of employés in the

kitchen, dining-hall and bakery to the number of one hundred and seventy-two. The list is as follows: One mess-hall sergeant, two corporals, sixty waiters, thirty-five dish-washers, seven breadcutters, four knife-cleaners, ten moppers,

two elevator attendants, thirty-two cooks and assistants, eighteen bakers and helpers and one vermin destroyer.

In addition to these, one hundred and fifty-three men are detailed each week from the "Camp" to supplement the paid force of waiters, making three hundred and twenty-five in all. No women are employed anywhere in the Home. Now, where does all the food come from?

Every quarter a schedule of requirements is sent out from the Commissary Department, and advertised in several daily papers. It states the quantity wanted of tea, bacon, crackers, mincemeat, beans, pickles, mustard, tripe,