Cherry Bounce

4 lbs. of sour and the same quantity of sweet cherries. 2 1/2 lbs. white sugar. 1 gallon best whiskey.

Crush the cherries to pieces by pounding in a deep wooden vessel with a smooth billet of wood. Beat hard enough to crack all the stones. Put into a deep stone jar, mix in the sugar well, and cover with the whiskey. Shake around briskly and turn into a demijohn. Cork tightly and let it stand a month, shaking it every day, and another month without touching it. Then strain off and bottle.

It is better a year than six months old.

If the Maltese cross appears but seldom in the section devoted to drinks, it is because most of my information respecting their manufacture is second-hand. In my own family they are so little used, except in sickness, that I should not dare to teach others, upon my own authority, how to prepare them. Indeed, the temptation I felt to omit many of them reminded me of a remark made, introductory of preserves, by one of the "Complete Housewives," who, all five together, drove me to the verge of an attack of congestion* of the brain, before I had been a housekeeper for a week. Said this judicious lady: - "Preserves of all kinds are expensive and indigestible, and therefore poisonous. Therefore" - again - "I shall not give directions for their manufacture, except to remark that barberries stewed in molasses are economical, and a degree less hurtful than most others of that class of compounds."

Then I reflected that I might, upon the same principle, exclude all receipts in which cocoanut is used, because it is rank poison to me; while a dear friend of mine would as soon touch arsenic as an egg. A large majority of the beverages I have named are highly medicinal, and deserve a place in the housekeeper's calendar on that account. Many, so far from being hurtful, are beneficial to a weak stomach or a system suffering under general debility. None which contain alcohol in any shape should be used daily, much less semi- or tri-daily by a well person.

This principle reduced to practice would prove the preventive ounce which would cure, all over the land, the need for Temperance Societies and Inebriate Asylums.