WEST INDIA PINE-APPLES.
AN addition has been made to our itinerant venders of dainties. Costermongers are of old standing; "fine Cheeney oranges" date from before Hogarth : but this season sees, for the first time, the I,' fruiterers for the million" shoving trucks before them tempt- ingly strewed with pine-apples, the new import from the Ba- hamas. Our street gourmands have become recherche—their tastes require the gratification of a wide variety. Smoking po- tatoes with slices of butter—hot eels from the tin stewpans of peripatetic cooks—wilks or periwinkles—pies of various inde-
able ingredients—perhaps bread and a hunch of bacon—form the substantials of their al fresco meals; but their desserts are varied in the extreme. To all kinds of indigenous fruits, from the-sloe upwards, are added oranges, cocoa-nuts, pine-apples, and numerous other exoties. The hawkers divide and subdivide the exotic luxuries to reduce them to the capacity of the most scantily- lined pocket. The Bahama clippers and the London slicers are theCobweb and Mustardseed of our Bottoms—hard-handed me- chanicals, who work for bread on stalls—they put a girdle round the globe to bring them richer relishes than the bag of an bumble- bee, and do not fret themselves in the action. Were this no more than a trifling augmentation of the innocent pleasures of sense, so scantily doled out to the poor, it would be matter of congratu- lation. But it is more—it is something that extends the range of their ideas. The honest gourmand, as he savours his square inch of pine-apple, is led to think about the Bahamas. This agreeable suggestion of new ideas stands in the same relation to the dry teaching of the National Schools that the gingerbread horn-books of King Pepin's day did to the rod and brow austere of his pedagogue. It is old Horace's approved mode of coaxing to learning by presents of nuts and apples. The amateurs of cocoa-nuts and pine-apples are raised above those whose fancy never strayed beyond lollipops, both msthetically and intellec- tually. Their tastes are cultivated, and their knowing faculties at the same time.
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