My first visit to Turin dates as far back as 1831. We are so personal, that our impressions of things depend less on their intrinsic worth than on such or such extrinsic circumstance which may affect our mental vision at the moment. I suppose mine was affected by the mist and rain which graced the capital of Piedmont on the morning of my arrival there. Another incident, microscopic, and almost too ludicrous to mention, had no less its weight in the scale of prepossession. I was tired and hungry, and, while the _diligence_ was being unloaded, I entered a _caffé_ close by, and called for some buttered toast. My hair (I had plenty at that time) stood on end at the answer I received. There was no buttered toast to be had, the waiter said. "It was not the custom." I confess I augured ill of a city from whose _caffés_, unlike all others throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished. I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty. My mother--bless her soul!--brought me up in the faith of buttered toast. I had breakfasted upon it all my life. I could conceive of no breakfast without it. Hence the shock I felt. "Not the custom!" Why not, I wondered. A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you! It has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years. If I had a thousand dollars,--a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the pen,--I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best memoir on this question:--"Why is buttered toast excluded from the _caffés_ of Turin?" It is not from lack of proper materials,--for heaps of butter and mountains of rolls are to be seen on every side; it is not from lack of taste,--for the people which has invented the _grisini_, and delights in the white truffle, shows too keen a sense of what is dainty not to exclude the charge of want of taste. "Pray, what are the _grisini?_ what is the white truffle?" asks the inquisitive reader.--The _grisini_ are bread idealized, bread under the form of walking-sticks a third of a little finger in diameter, and from which every the least particle of crumb has been carefully eliminated. It is light, easy of digestion, cracks without effort under your teeth, and melts in your mouth. It is savory eaten alone, excellent with your viands, capital sopped in wine. A good Turinese would rather have no dinner at all than sit down to one without a good-sized bundle of these torrified reeds on his right or left. Beware of the spurious imitations of this inimitable mixture of flour, which you will light on in some _passages_ in Paris! They possess nothing of the _grisini_ but the name. "I have it!" I fancy I hear some imaginative reader exclaim at this place. "The passion for the _grisini_ accounts most naturally for the want of buttered toast in Turin. Don't you see that it is replaced by the _grisini?_" A mistake, a profound mistake. _Grisini_ are _never_ served with your coffee or chocolate. Try again.