The next step was to have our manager understand just what we wanted and a number of us formed ourselves into an experimental catering and cooking committee having first secured an excellent range for our cook-house. This cooking really belonged to the women, but we men assumed the right to examine into it, whether it was ours or not. We saw to the procuring of the food, and therefor felt empowered to know that it was properly served. I have always felt great sympathy for Xantippe who is generally written down as a scold, for it is recorded that Socrates would often, unawares to her, invite a number of his friends to dinner when he had not provided a scrap for the larder. What true wife, though she had the temper of an angel, would not give it recriminating voice and action under such circumstances? We provided, and so had our rights. Our first effort was with various kinds of good substantial soup. I had enough skimmed broth in my school days to last me for life and the very recollection of it causes in me a kind of water brash. We succeeded and made out a list of soups to be prepared in a wholesale way of the best materials, at such a price that any wayfarer or aristocrat coming to our club, could relish a bowl of it, and also that families belonging to the club, could send in their orders the day before for what they wanted. The price just above the cost, was so much below what they could be made for in their homes, and so much better, that we had many orders. We also had the best of bread, cake and biscuit, made in the cleanest possible way. If the Europeans in India could see how their bread is made by the natives in the bazars, they would eschew it forever, and diet on fruits and vegetables. It is scarcely credible the methods of the native cooks. I once at table gravely asked my khansaman, if they really strained our soup through their turbans? Putting his hands together in front of him, with a slight bow he replied: “What else can we do if their Honors do not give us towels?” Once, as a guest, eating food provided by a zemindar, he placidly looking on, I turned and noticed two of the servants, the one pouring milk through the shirt-tail of the other, straining it for me to drink. A sahib blaming his khansaman for boiling the roly poly in one of his master’s socks, the fellow gravely replied: “Sahib! it was not one of the clean ones!” A friend of mine eating his mutton chops and finding some cottony shreds in his mouth questioned his cook standing by, when the latter replied, that as he had no tallow, he had used the waste ends of the burned candles. The sahib at once seized his chef and holding him by the neck forced all the remaining mess down his throat, for which he was summoned before the magistrate and had to pay a fine of twenty-five rupees. “But,” said my friend, “I would willingly have paid five times that amount for the satisfaction I got in making him swallow the rest of the stuff with the burnt wicks.”