“Ay, ay, I am sure it will be the very best dinner that ever was cooked;” and the voice of Pomponius Cotta answered him gaily, that “Little Zita was not the best cook in Genoa for nothing,” and that he would not part with her for I don’t know how many thousand sesterces. Poor Zita saw in this only a cruel jest. For certain another cook had been engaged in her place, and she herself would be had up after the banquet, taunted with its success, confronted with her rival, and perhaps scourged to death amid the clatter of drinking-cups. Her eyes blinded with tears, she descended again to the court-yard, and fervently, though despairingly, breathed one brief prayer to our Lady of the Chapel. She had scarcely done so, when the great folding-doors of the kitchen flew open, and there issued forth a tremendous cloud of ambrosial vapour, radiant, golden, roseate, azure, in which celestial odours were mingled with the unmistakeable smell of the very best dinner that ever was cooked. And lo! hovering in the cloud, the rapt eye of little Saint Zita seemed to descry myriads of little airy figures in white caps and jackets, even like unto cooks, but who all had wings and little golden knives at their girdles. And she heard the same soft music that had stolen upon her ears in the chapel; and as the angelic cooks fluttered out of the kitchen, it seemed as though each little marmiton saluted the blushing cheek of the trembling saint with a soft and soothing kiss. At the same time the army of earthly cook’s assistants awoke as one scullion, and without so much as yawning, took their places at the dresser-board, and composedly began to dish the dinner. And little Zita, hurrying from furnace to furnace, and lifting up the lids of casserole and bain-marie pan, found, done to a turn, a dinner even such as she with all her culinary genius would never have dreamt of. Of course it was a miracle. Of course it was the very best dinner ever dressed: what else could it have been with such cooks? They talk of it to this day in Genoa; though I am sorry to say the Genoese cooks have not profited by the example, and do not seek to emulate it. They have the best maccaroni, and dress it worse than any people in Europe. The legend ought properly to end with a relation of how Pomponius Cotta gave his little cook her freedom, how the guests loaded her with presents, and how she married the major domo, and was the happy mother of many good cooks and notable housewives. But the grim old monkish tradition has it, that little Zita died a virgin, and, alas, a martyr! But she was canonised at her death; and even as St. Crispin looks after the interests of cobblers, and St. Barbe has taken artillerymen under his special patronage, so the patroness of cooks has ever been little Saint Zita. Now ready, price Five Shillings and Sixpence, cloth boards, THE TWELFTH VOLUME OF HOUSEHOLD WORDS, Containing from No. 280 to No. 303 (both inclusive) and the extra Christmas Number.