gment.

Caroline's cook goes to Biffi's, comes back from Biffi's, and exhibits
to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman's ears.

"Very good," she says, "did he explain to you how to cook them?"

"Oh, for us cooks, them's a mere nothing," replies the cook.

As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except
how a cook may feather his nest.

At evening, during the second course, all Caroline's fibres quiver
with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
waited for her husband.

But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
there is, to the souls of the elect--and everybody will include a
woman who adores her husband among the elect--there is, between these
two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine
night and a fine day.

The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges
his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline's extreme
emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers
who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for
some kind of shell-fish.

"Well, Adolphe?"

"Well, dear."

"Don't you recognize them?"

"Recognize what?"

"Your mushrooms _a l'Italienne_?"

"These mushrooms! I thought they were--well, yes, they _are_
mushrooms!"

"Yes, and _a l'Italienne_, too."

"Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
them!"

"What kind is it you like, then?"

"_Fungi trifolati_."

Let us observe--to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a
butterfly's legs with pincers--that we still want a nomenclature for
the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to
produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed
that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been
adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were
desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen
Latin.

"My dear," resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face
of his chaste Caroline, "