complement of plates, glasses, victuals, and so on, and each capable of accommodating three or four couples at a time. To one of these, if you are wise, and have the luck to espy any vacant chairs, you will surely--I am of course addressing my male readers--lead your partner. I assume that, with an experienced eye to this very thing, you have purposely contrived to engage one with whom you specially enjoy, or think it likely that you will enjoy, a good gossip, for a quadrille that occurs just at this period of the evening, and that you have suggested "sitting out" the dance in the supper-room; so that you have now descended the stairs happy in the consciousness of ten minutes or more of leisure before the next "round" will again demand your indefatigable _trois temps_ in the ball-room. Well, two chairs secured, and partner comfortably seated on one of them, the next thing for the man to do, before settling down into conversation, is to forage at the buffet for supplies; for the stock originally placed on the little table is pretty sure to have been eviscerated in the course of the first half hour's attack. He doesn't ask his partner to say what she will have, knowing full well that ladies, young and old, even if so interrogated, are sure to give that invariable pair of successive answers, "chicken" and "jelly," not because they really prefer those to any other viands--as a matter of fact, their own inclinations, so far as they are earthly enough to have any, are generally very much otherwise--but from a modest wish to give the least possible trouble; chicken and jelly being stock dishes that are quite certain to be at hand in every supper-room. No, he is far more likely to please by asking to have the matter left in his hands, and thereupon going off to the buffet, to return with a small but varied collection of three or four samples, each on a separate plate, of the most novel and attractive of the culinary triumphs there displayed, for her to choose from. Which duty done, and some champagne and seltzer-water deftly mixed, he will with a light heart take possession of his reserved chair, and fall to upon one or other of the unchosen samples and the most thoroughly zestful chat of the evening.