Now back again to our _menu_. Eggs and bacon is perhaps the commonest breakfast dish in England. And a thoroughly good and wholesome dish it is, too, if properly cooked. Of course if the eggs are stale and the bacon is half raw and swimming in grease, it is indigestible; but properly cooked fresh eggs—preferably poached and underdone—and crisp grilled bacon is a very digestible food. It is curious that although pork is one of the most indigestible of meats, bacon is tolerated by the most delicate and disordered stomachs. Fried fish is another excellent breakfast dish. Whiting, soles and plaice are the three most digestible of fried fish. Herrings and eels are bilious and difficult to digest. Hot rolls and butter are proverbially indigestible. But our close wool-like bread is far more difficult to digest than the light, more glutinous _bâtons_ of the French breakfast. Indeed, these light rolls, consisting of little more than holes stuck together, are not so very indigestible. Why we cannot get them in England we do not know. Oatmeal is the national breakfast dish of the Scotch. The Highlander makes his meal of oatmeal before his long day in the open air. The English lord, when he goes deer-stalking in the Grampians, also takes oatmeal for his breakfast, and finds it a wholesome and sustaining food. But when he returns to Mayfair, he would no more think of eating oatmeal for breakfast than he would dine off sawdust. The Scotch brag greatly about the value of oatmeal as a diet, and they would persuade us Londoners that oatmeal is the best breakfast dish we can take. But when we say that it makes us heavy, and gives us indigestion, they always answer, “That is because you do not make it properly.” But that is not the reason. Oatmeal is a very nutritious food, but it is not easily digested; and so, although the Scotch peasant likes it, and can digest it because of his outdoor life and laborious occupation, the Londoner, with his sedentary life in a smoky city, cannot digest it. And for him it is an unsuitable diet. Last and least as regards expense, but most important from the numbers who eat it, is the homely bloater. Dried fish is not very easy to digest, but is highly nutritious and is cheap. And when you can get nutritious food at a cheap rate, you must expect to give a little extra trouble to digest it. Smoked salmon is far and away the worst form of dried fish. It is much the most indigestible, it is very expensive, and it is not really half so tasty as a kipper. A little bread and marmalade forms a pleasant end to the breakfast. But what does this mean—“Good-bye, I am so glad to have had breakfast with you, but I must rush off to catch my train, as I have to be in the City by 9.30 A.M.” What! Running to catch a train immediately after a meal? Then in future you had better belong to that class that eats no breakfast. Better have an empty stomach than a full one which you will not allow yourself to digest. (_To be continued._)