eat driblets, driblets you shall eat, under one shape or another. The only way to preserve your peace, is to be content with appearances. Take what is set before you, asking no questions for conscience' sake. If it looks nice, that is enough. Eat and be thankful. Trollope says he never made a single comfortable meal at an American hotel. The meat was swimming in grease, and the female servants uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow, and provoking. Occasionally they are a little slow, it must be confessed; but I never met with one, male or female, who was uncivil, impudent, or provoking. If I supposed it possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us, the possible synonyme of Pharisaism or stupidity, I should recommend to him Lord Chesterfield's assertion, that a man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's bad manners. For the greasy meats, let him forego meats altogether and take chickens, and he will not find grease enough to soil his best coat, if he should carry the chick away in his pocket. We always found a sufficient variety to enable us to choose a wholesome and a toothsome dinner, with many tempting dainties, and scores of dishes that I never heard of before, and ordered dubiously by way of experiment, and tasted timorously in pursuit of knowledge. As for the corn-cake of the White Hills, if I live a thousand years, I never expect anything in the line of biscuit, loaf, or cakes more utterly satisfactory. It is the very ultimate crystallization of cereals, the poetry and rhythm of bread, brown and golden to the eye, like the lush loveliness of October, crumbling to the touch, un-utterable to the taste. It has all the ethereal, evanishing fascination of a spirit. Eve might have set it before Raphael. You scarcely dare touch it lest it disappear and leave you disappointed and desolate. It is melting, insinuating,--a halo, hovering on the border-land of dream and reality, beautiful but uncertain vision, a dissolving view. I said something of the sort to Halicarnassus one morning, and he said, Yes, it was--on my plate. And yet I have never had as much as I wanted of it,--never. The others were perpetually finishing their breakfast and compelling me, by a kind of moral violence, to finish mine. I made an attempt one morning, the last of my sojourn among the Delectable Mountains, when the opposing elements had left the table prematurely to make arrangements for departure, and startled the waiter by ordering an unlimited supply of corn-cake. Like a thunder-bolt fell on my ear the terrible answer: "There isn't any this morning. It is brown bread." Me miserable!