l; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an
old humorist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His
circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are
fond of having a character at your table, and truly he is one." But in
the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman
dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L----s, or what does she at
their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine
times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something
between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously
sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be represt
sometimes--_aliquando sufflaminandus erat_--but there is no raising
her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped after the
gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honor of taking wine with her; she
hesitates between port and Madeira, and chooses the former because he
does. She calls the servant _sir_, and insists on not troubling him to
hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's
governess takes upon her to correct her when she has mistaken the
piano for a harpsichord.

III

THE ORIGIN OF ROAST PIG[23]

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging
enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages
ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just
as they do in Abyssinia to-day. This period is not obscurely hinted at
by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane
Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term
Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say,
that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the
elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following.
The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as
his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the
care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of
playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some
sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread
the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was
reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian
makeshift of a building, you may think it), w