Horace's favorite dish of beans, with the bacon; potatoes; some savory
stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat; celery, and a radish or
two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for desert, and brown bread.

75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and
interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the
Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,--things that are
gathered with the hand--podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or
shaken down, but must be gathered green. "Leguminous" plants, all of
them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods,
--"lætum siliqua quassante legumen"--smooth and tender leaves, divided
into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and
sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and
almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes
of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their
parts, and not passing into other forms. It is also the most usefully
extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest--
acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field--bean and vetch
and pea; familiar in the pasture--in every form of clustered clover and
sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all
orders of plants.

76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem
of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for
its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst
natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco.* And the strange thing
about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a
group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function. There
is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom;
but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with