None could serve up in such style the great standard dishes of Roman cookery. The wild boar of Troy, with honey, oil, flour and garum; the Campanian sow, fed from golden troughs, stuffed with chestnuts and spices, and brought to table whole with her nine little sucking pigs disposed around her in sweet sauce; the vol au vents of peacocks’ tongues, and ortolans’ eyes, and beccaficos’ brains. Yet, though great in these, she excelled in fanciful, ravishing, gem-like dishes--in what the French call “surprises”--in culinary epigrams, edible enigmas, savoury fables, poems that you could eat and drink. She had sauces, the secrets of which have gone to Paradise with her; she had feats of legerdemain in compounding dishes that no life-long apprenticeship could teach. And, withal, she was so saving, so economical, so cleanly in her arrangements, that her kitchen was like a street in the clean village of Brock (I should not like to pass half an hour even in Velour’s kitchen); and her noble master had the satisfaction of knowing that he gave the mightiest “spreads” in Genoa at anything but an unreasonable or ruinous expense. She was as honest as a child’s smile, and was as regardless of kitchen stuff, perquisites, Christmas boxes from tradesmen, and the dangerous old crones who hung about the area and cried hare-skins, as your own cook, madam, I hope may be. And, above all, little Zita had no followers, had boxed the major-domo’s ears for offering her a pair of fillagree ear-rings, and was exceeding pious.