There is just one other point to touch upon, that of the meals of the kitchen. It is quite enough to allow an ordinary middle-class household good bread and butter, oatmeal porridge, and tea, coffee, or cocoa for breakfast; the kitchen dinner should be the same as the dining-room luncheon; tea might be supplemented by jam or an occasional home-made cake; and supper should be presumably bread and cheese, but any soup made from the receipts in the chapter on ‘entertaining,’ or odds and ends left at the late dinner, can be consumed if you can trust your cook; if you cannot, you must lay down a hard-and-fast rule of bread and cheese, and insist on its being kept, otherwise you will find yourselves in the case of a friend of mine, who went into her larder after an enormous dinner-party, expecting to find herself free from the necessity of ordering more food for at least a week, and discovered it empty, swept, and garnished, because, the cook informed her, they always had for their suppers any little thing ‘as was’ left over. Never be afraid to praise your servants, as one lady is I know of, for fear they may think she cannot do without them: we _can’t_ do without them--why should we pretend we can? They are far more likely to remain where they are appreciated and cared for than where they know they are only looked upon as so much necessary furniture; and do not be afraid to blame them, emulating another friend of mine, who saw her servant reading her letters at her desk, and stepped out of the room unobserved because she shrank from the disagreeable but emphatically necessary task of telling the maid of her odious and dishonourable fault; but say straight out to the delinquent servant herself what you have in your mind against her, never sending the message by another servant, nor nagging, but remarking firmly what you have to say yourself in such a way that she cannot avoid perceiving you mean emphatically what you say. Let your maids have good books to read, and let them see newspapers, but do not keep a kitchen bookshelf. This they distrust at once, and look out for their own literature, which is generally pernicious; but if you yourself have read a good story, recommend it to them, and talk to them about it. You can always get a servant to read proper books by taking care to read them yourself, and by letting them see you are sharing your literature with them; even if they spoil or soil the book, books are cheap, and they had better do this than soil their minds by the rubbish they might buy, revolting naturally against ‘Lizzy, or a Parlourmaid’s Duties, described in a story,’ or ‘Grace, or How to Clean Silver,’ or the similar charming works which one generally finds in the houses of those who keep ‘kitchen bookshelves,’ regardless of the fact that Ouida and other exquisite feminine novelists are the favourite food of the drawing-room, and that they could not read one page of the ‘books’ themselves provided for the maid’s entertainment.