Huîtres de Whitstable Fantaisie Epicurienne. Tortue verte en Tasse. Turbotin poché, Sauce Mousseline. Julienne de Sole Parisienne. Mousse de Volaille Régence. Côtelettes d'Agneau Rothschild. Pommes Anna. Punch Romaine. Bécassine sur Canapé. Salade de Laitue. Escalope de Homard Pompadour. Pêche Flambé au Kirsch. Paillettes au Parmesan. Fruits. Corbeille de Friandises Café. VINS. Amontillado. Marcobrunner, 1904. Bollinger and Co., 1904. Lanson, 1906. Martinez Port, 1896. Grand Fine Champagne, 1875. Many of the banquets given at the Monico are masonic ones, and the new temple at the top of the house on the Shaftesbury Avenue side is a very splendid shrine, with walls of marble and a dome round which the signs of the zodiac circle, and with doors and furniture of great beauty. LVII THE ITALIAN INVASION The plains of Lombardy, the pleasant mountain land of Emilia and the champaign that surrounds Turin, are studded with comfortable villas, the property of successful Italian restaurateurs who have made a comfortable little fortune in London and who go to their own much-loved country to spend the autumn of their days. Every young North Italian waiter who comes to England believes that in the folds of his napkin he holds one of these pleasant villas, just as every French conscript in Napoleonic days thought that he, amongst all his fellows, alone felt the extra weight of the field-marshal's baton in his knapsack. No race in the world is more thrifty and more industrious than are these North Italians, and they rival the Swiss in their aptitude for making considerable sums of money by charging very small prices. Spain and Great Britain are usually classed together as the two countries in which the natives know least of economy in housekeeping and cookery, and the Italians, spying the wastefulness of the land, have descended on England as a friendly invading force, whereas the Swiss have taken Spain in hand. There is no Spanish town in which there is not a café Suizio, and there are very few English towns in which an Italian name is not found over a restaurant, which is often a pastry-cook's shop as well.