THE difference between the savage Tand the civilized man is that one eats, the other dines. The savage has no appointed time for meals. He feels hungry, kills something, kindles a fire, burns his food, and devours. The civilized man has his table carefully spread at properly regulated intervals of time, and invites commerce and science to compete to serve the banquet. For him ships sail, gardeners experimentalize, chemists cogitate, and cooks perspire. Great are the distinctions, ethnological, social, and personal, between the mere feeder and the man who dines.

'You see,' said a friend of ours, a great gastronome and authority on matters culinary, 'so few men know how to dine or to give dinners. No man wants to go through a set dinner every day, it would tire him to death, but he wants his one dish cooking, not spoiling. And then again at grand dinners, how badly they are arranged! There are too many things to choose from, the mind gets confused, and then away goes all enjoyment. There should be enough and there should be choice, but not more; and there may be one surprise in the dinner, but not more than one. One is agreeable, stimulates the appetite, enlivens conversation, and is a point of general interest. Men's minds, as it were, meet in the dish, but two give rise to argument and dispute and opposition."

'Do they really?' I said, astonished.

'Oh! yes,' replied my friend, dogmatically. The palate and the stomach have a mentality of their own, and are delicate and sensitive to a sneer or an allusion. Some people are so stupid! A man I dine with, an excellent fellow in other respects, because I once happened to praise a particular thing, always gives me that particular thing whenever I sit down to his table. you conceive such ignorance? The very name of the dish nauseates me now, and I always refuse his in

Can

vitations; so I have lost two pleasures by his stupidity.'

The idiot!' I murmured, indignantly.

'Quite so, quite so,' said my friend. 'Have you read Francatelli ?'

'No,' I answered, blushing for my ignorance of the literature of my native land.

'Clever book; very clever book. Divide Francatelli by half-that is, put in half the seasoning, pepper, girofleur, and so on, and you get the perfection of cookery. The salmon looks good to-day. Good morning.'

It is singular to see in Paris, from which charming city I write, the concessions made in restaurants, cafés, and hotels to what are presumed to be British tastes. Round about the Rue de la Paix, and the English quarter, houses as unmistakeably Parisian in appearance as pralines, bonbons, and sergens-de-ville, boldly print upon their doorposts, in gilded letters, the words Britannic Tavern. Mock turtle always ready.' What wonderful appreciation of the habits and feeding instincts of the haughty islander, who must always have his bulldog by his side and his basin of mock turtle at his elbow! So completely have the English colonized the neighbourhood that not only the Britannic Tavern and its ever-present mock turtle meets the eye everywhere in molten lustre, but the chemists and druggists roll pills and mix draughts suitable to English maladies and English indigestions. A large shop proclaims itself, in yellow letters six feet high, as The English Pharmacy,' and a golden legend follows that informs the dyspeptic foreigner that 'Natural soda-water' and magnesia' are to be drunk upon the premises. Natural sodawater!' This is indeed to be almost in England. We wonder the spirited entrepreneur does not also advertise 'real calomel,' or 'Cockle's antibilious pills without adulteration.' And magnesia too! Why make magnesia a leading article? It is an exceptional thing to find in

chemists' shops? or are English visitors supposed to be peculiarly attracted by that cooling powder? When the blond Briton enters the pharmacy, even before he commences with his perpetual Avez vous,' does the international chemist and druggist say to him, 'Do not give yourself the pain to speak, sir. I guess your wants. You are English and require magnesia. We have all sorts of magnesia. Magnesia hot, magnesia cold, magnesia still, magnesia sparkling. Behold!'

Goldsmith's beggar said that he hated the French because they were all slaves and wore wooden shoes. From my point of view let me say that I like the French, though they do not understand political freedom and eat ragouts. Let me also say that, although when in strange lands I trust that I feel the eyes of Baker Street are upon me, and bear myself with becoming pride, I infinitely prefer French cookery to that very plain roast and boiled, and that very gross grease and gravy which are the prandial glories of this free country, the ruin of the digestion, and the parents of bile.

Animated by the twofold desire of making gastronomic discovery and of getting the best dinners and breakfasts I could find, I resolved on a course of experimental meals; that is, believing that with the French, cookery is a science, and that with us it is a mere overboiled or underdone accident, I resolved on tasting how French artists treated British dishes. I had seen how French tragedians treated our grand standard intellectual dishes, and had been delighted with the elegant and accomplished foreigners' performances, and so went in full confidence in search of a Parisian chef's skilful handling of tea, beef, and, of course, mock turtle, without which, taking a Parisian view of English character, what is life?

It was high noon in the city of white façades and enormous Roman capitals when I bent my steps towards the Rue d'Aguesseau. I had made up my mind to renounce the spicy sausage of Lorraine, the lobster salad, the 'jumped' kidneys, fried potatoes, fleshy cherries, and pleasant

acid wine that usually formed my déjeuner, and to go in for breakfast after the manner of my ancestors; to give up my beautiful black, bitter, aromatic coffee, and-greatly daring

try some tea. I reached my British tavern, whose very windows and portals promised pale ale, lunches, and stout, entered, and found everything arranged café fashion, except that the lady behind the counter, instead of being surrounded by vases of flowers, small statuary, and the like, was supported on her right by a large piece of beef, cooked to please the presumed English appetite-that is, hardly cooked at all-and on her left by an enormous highly-varnished and illuminated ham. Cold veal cutlets and yesterday's sausages, these last looking very crumby and neglected, were grouped about her in symmetrical order. That the dame du comptoir in a restaurant should have an entourage of eatables is no doubt severely practical, but I am still sentimental enough to prefer the flowers and a little fountain in a nest of fernery.

'Waut would you like to taike, sair?' said a waiter as soon as I had sat down. He spoke very good English, with but a slight accent. 'I'll take some breakfast.' 'Yais, sair. Coffee?'

'No, tea.'

'A pot of tea; yais, sair; and some beef-rosbif?'

I shuddered as I looked at the half-raw mass of meat. The waiter, who was an artist, saw that I was impressionable, and permitted me to take the initiative.

'What can I have?' I asked.

'Anything you please to order, sair?' replied he, determined not to shock my sensibilities, but to give my imagination free play. As I had made up my mind to have a perfectly British meal, my first idea, of course, was bacon; but I remembered that I had been once served with a small square lump of fat like a compact grease brick, and the recollection terrified me. I looked at the dish that seemed to garnish the dame du comptoir, as the parsley garnished the dish, and said, 'I'll take some-ham!'

'Yais, sair. Du jambon!' he shouted, as if the dame du comptoir were a mile off. The lady rose, smiled at me as if to say, 'I take the greatest possible pleasure in serving you,' and seizing a dreadful sacrificial-looking knife, whose edge was even sharper than her smile was sweet, began to carve juicily and daintily.

When a thick, heavy plate had been covered with slices of Vauxhallian tenuity, the preparations for my banquet languished. I seemed to pass out of the waiter's memory, and the dame du comptoir, with a perfidy only excusable from the proverbial coquetry of the Parisienne, bestowed her smiles upon a black-bearded Frenchman, who entered and commanded half a bottle of wine and half a yard of bread.

Was it possible! The misguided native, possibly impelled by a desire to have the air Britannic, desired beef. I cannot describe that scene of horror; suffice it that, according to the printed nursery legend about apple pie, the dame du comptoir Cut it, the waiter Brought it-the-thethe Vampire-I can call him nothing else Divided it, and He (E without the H in the original) Eat it! I thought of rushing from the restaurant breakfastless, but as I conceived my flight my eye caught that of the dame du comptoir, who smiled me into subjugation, and I kept my seat.

For three-quarters of an hour did I wait for that pot of tea, my plate of ham upon the counter taunting me the whole time. I endeavoured to amuse myself with the 'Siècle,' the Presse,' and the Constitutionnel'the vampire had secured yesterday's Times-and read those dreary faits divers that reflect so much discredit on the research, and so much credit on the invention of the Gallic penny-a-liner.

Fifty minutes, and no pot of tea! Perhaps, I thought, though the Parisian takes more time than the London chef, the result is more perfect, or perhaps the water does not boil.

At last! A small and ricketty teapot, the knob of the lid cocked knowingly on one side, was brought

in by the waiter, who was obviously afraid of it. Monsieur was served. Ham, bread, English mustard, all! I observed the waiter eye me with anxiety. I poured out the tea, which was pale, nay, very pale,' put in milk and sugar, and sipped a spoonful.

Mrs. Gamp once observed that 'fiddle-strings were weakness to express her nerves' upon a particular occasion. To pursue that lady's cloudy metaphor violoncello-strings were filaments to describe that tea. I was just about to order a cup of coffee when the waiter came up to the table and said

'Per-rhaps, sair, your tea is not quite str-rong enough?"

'Not quite,' I replied, sarcastically, ladling it about, as if it were too hot soup.

'Permit, sair, that I fetch again.'

And I had to endure another interval of twelve minutes; but this time I solaced myself with 'Figaro' and La Vie Parisienne.' My rakish-looking teapot was again brought me; the tea was a little stronger, but not much. I managed a cup of it, and then made up with coffee and cognac. My little note amounted to

My next was a mock-turtle soup experience. I had often eyed the lively 'Mock Turtle,' as I called the restaurant to myself; and one cool day in January I determined to satisfy my curiosity and appetite. I entered, and an odour as of mock turtle in solution was wafted to my nostrils. The saloon was old-fashioned, and somewhat dark-two things especially agreeable to me. I detest dining in the glare and glitter of a hundred gas-jets, a thousand cut-glass lustres, and the million prisms dangling and dazzling therefrom. Can any decoration for a dining-room be more unfortu