As buckwheat cakes are the usual finale of an American breakfast, I will explain what they are, and how they are to be eaten. The cakes are made from a batter (as the name implies) of buckwheat meal. They are done on a griddle. Each is in diameter about the size of the palm of one’s hand, and in thickness about the sixth of an inch. The usual way of serving them at hotels is three cakes, one on the top of another, to each person; not from any wish to limit the number consumed, but because they cannot be eaten in perfection if more or less than three are brought at one time. You then prepare them yourself, by lifting the uppermost one with your fork, and buttering the upper surface of the middle one (if they are not hot enough to melt the butter they are worthless) you then reverse your pile of three, and lifting what had been the bottom one, repeat the process of buttering. That completed, you pour upon them from a jug, which is always brought with them, enough maple-syrup, or that failing, enough clarified syrup of sugar to cover them. They are now ready, and are by no means to be despised. As the buckwheat, however, is a little oleaginous, the cakes are a little leathery—so much the better, many will say; but this, and the combination of butter and syrup, must, one would think, render them somewhat dyspeptic. Still they are universally approved of, and it is the waiter’s business at an hotel, when he sees you are finishing your breakfast, to ask you ‘if you will have some cakes.’ There would be something to say in favour of concluding a moderate breakfast occasionally in this way, but to make the cakes a daily addition to a varied and solid meal is to presume too much on one’s strength. Who but would be appalled at contemplating the amount of work which half a century of such breakfasts would impose upon himself? [Sidenote: _Slap-jacks._] Where buckwheat meal, as in the Western prairies, cannot always be had, a good and orthodox substitute is the slap-jack, which is made and served in precisely the same way, the only difference being that of the material, which is wheaten flour. As this latter preparation is capable, and I think worthy, of acclimatisation, I will mention that the batter from which it is made has no other ingredients than flour, water, and soda. The griddle must be rubbed with a piece of suet before it is heated, and again before it is used. Serve in threes—very hot—with butter and syrup, as with the buckwheat cakes. I picked up this bit of culinary lore at a solitary ranche on the plains, where, having exhausted all the more obvious resources of the place, there was nothing else to do. At the great hotels five meals a day are allowed. This is too much, not for the hotels, for such liberality is attractive (of course they all have a fixed price per day, ranging from three and a half to five dollars, for bed and board), but it is too much for the guests who avail themselves of it.