Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar, which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with 'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business belching like a torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he is ready for a little snack--oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind. Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning guzzle of the Englishman's day, and a function usually spread over a couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred, undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the risk of not losing one's figure, and of having the neighbours say that one cannot afford it. The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen table-spoonfuls of _consomme_, or _petite marmite_, or _bisque_, as the case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down the menu--too much of everything, and don't you think you can put me off with your blooming homoeopathic portions. A liberal table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow is nobody's fault.