family mahogany tree, all may be fanciful decoration, and not half enough to eat, electric light, and _à la_ with attendance charged in the bill. The only way to stop this sort of thing is to bring the system into ridicule, to try it on the groundlings. A fair leader of _ton_, late in the sixties, appeared one morning in the haunts of fashion, her shapely shoulders covered with a cape of finest Russian sables, to the general admiration and envy of all her compeers. Thereupon, what did her dearest friend and (of course) most deadly rival do? Get a similar cape, or one of finer quality? Not a bit of it. She drove off, then and there, to her furriers, and had her coachman and footman fitted with similar capes, in (of course) cheaper material; and, when next afternoon she took the air in the park, in her perfectly appointed landau, her fur-clad menials created something like a panic in the camp of her enemy, whilst fur capes for fair leaders of "_ton_," were, like hashed venison at a City luncheon, very soon "hoff." It is extremely probable that, could it be arranged to feed our starving poor, beneath the public gaze, on _sôles Normandes_, _côtelettes à la Reform_, and _salmi de gibier truffé_; to feast our workhouse children on _bisque d'écrévisses_ and _Ananas à la Créole_, the upper classes of Great Britain would soon revert to plain roast and boiled. But after all it is the English caterer who is chiefly to blame for his own undoing. How is it that in what may be called the "food streets" of the metropolis the foreign food-supplier should outnumber the purveyor of the Roast Beef of Old England in the proportion of fifty to one? Simply because the Roast Beef of Old England has become almost as extinct as the Dodo. There are but few English kitchens, at this end of the nineteenth century, in the which meat is roasted in front of the fire. In order to save the cost of fuel, most English (save the mark!) cooking is now performed by gas or steam; and at many large establishments the food, whether fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables or pastry, all goes, in a raw state, into a species of chest of drawers made of block-tin, in which receptacle the daily luncheons, dinners, and suppers are steamed and robbed of all flavour, save that of hot tin. The pity of it! Better, far better for mankind the _à la_ system than to be gradually "steamed" into the tomb!