Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious waste of time, and also of human energy that might be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive methods could have come into use. Perhaps they originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic society, when an abundance of servants must be trained to serve and when distinctions in eating were a part of the distinction in rank. But to have introduced these laborious and unintelligent methods into hotels, where persons tarry for comfort and into homes that do not need to maintain an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous imitation. The numbers of courses, with more service than food, that one often meets at the table d'hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are most exasperating to one who values time and has a serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the bodily apparatus. Here is the performance--it was nothing more than a performance, consisting in repeated changing of all the dishes, the removing of every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small separate parcels of food--that it was my lot to endure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that had little else to distinguish it: Course 1. Dry bread (no butter). Removal. Course 2. Soup (nothing else). Removal. Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side. Removal. Course 4. Veal, macaroni. Removal. Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else). Removal. Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary). Removal. Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake. Removal. Course 8. Fruit (slight). Removal. Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker. Removal. Course 10. Coffee. Relief. The traveler knows that this species of time-wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not unusual and does not merit such considerate attention, although it may profit by the magnification. All this contributes nothing to human efficiency--quite the reverse--and certainly nothing to the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's subsistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious uselessness is quite immoral.