col here drank the health of the _chef_ in a glass of CLIQUOT'S
champagne amid general applause.

Your Correspondent is aware of the painful effect that would be produced
on your readers, condemned to drag on a miserable existence on the
indigestible products of an English kitchen, if he were to enumerate and
describe the dishes that completed the repast--all light, savoury,
succulent, and nourishing. But why, he begs to ask, is it, that with
confessedly inferior materials a French artist can make up a dinner, and
a good one, where an Anglo Saxon cook only furnishes instruments of
stomachic torture? The fact is certain and the answer plain. A Frenchman
considers his occupation as an art and throws his soul into it. Success
is his ambition and, when achieved, his pride, and he pleases himself
when he pleases you. Compare his enlightened enthusiasm with the view
MARIAR or SOOSAN takes of her _metier_. Think of the impenetrable
stupidity, the indolent unconscientiousness, the complacent conceit, and
the obstinacy which hardens the hearts towards us of that matron and
that maid, and by their hands infuses death into the pot. O MARIAR! O
SOOSAN! be wise in time, learn your business, and be not slothful
therein; listen to a voice of warning from a foreign strand, lest the
day arrive when Missus is compelled to descend into the kitchen as
Missuses used to do in times gone by, and your empire over your
employers be broken up once and for ever.

The generous produce of a Burgundian autumn flamed in our glasses,
loosening the tongue and not blunting the wit. The effect was varied and
delightful. Old MARTINGALE, who had been very hard on the Lancers of the
Guard, admitted that in a campaign the French cavalry might be awkward
customers. DE FAULTER ceased his allusions to the card-playing at the
Cercle, and his coups at NORRIS'S. ORTOLAN showed that he could talk on
other subjects than gastronomy, and DE COURCY was civil to SHEFFIELD
HIGSON, who, on the other hand, abstained from enumerating his
acquaintances among that aristocracy with whose utter worthlessness and
degradation he was so much impressed. Your Correspondent, who is always
pleasant and equable, was, if possible, more so than usual, and in the
intervals of his brilliant sallies, added by acute observation to those
stores of limpid wisdom, whence he periodically dispenses to your
readers.

* * * * *

SOMETHING IN A NAME AFTER ALL.

W