I followed the chair to some closed curtains at one end of the room, which I had not hitherto noticed. Drawing aside the curtains, he revealed to view an alcove, in which stood a neat little gas-stove for cooking. Drawers and cupboards, plates, dishes, and saucepans, were ranged around the alcove--all on a miniature scale, all scrupulously bright and clean. “Welcome to the kitchen!” said Miserrimus Dexter. He drew out of a recess in the wall a marble slab, which served as a table, and reflected profoundly, with his hand to his head. “I have it!” he cried, and opening one of the cupboards next, took from it a black bottle of a form that was new to me. Sounding this bottle with a spike, he pierced and produced to view some little irregularly formed black objects, which might have been familiar enough to a woman accustomed to the luxurious tables of the rich, but which were a new revelation to a person like myself, who had led a simple country life in the house of a clergyman with small means. When I saw my host carefully lay out these occult substances of uninviting appearance on a clean napkin, and then plunge once more into profound reflection at the sight of them, my curiosity could be no longer restrained. I ventured to say, “What are those things, Mr. Dexter, and are we really going to eat them?” He started at the rash question, and looked at me with hands outspread in irrepressible astonishment. “Where is our boasted progress?” he cried. “What is education but a name? Here is a cultivated person who doesn’t know Truffles when she sees them!” “I have heard of truffles,” I answered, humbly, “but I never saw them before. We had no such foreign luxuries as those, Mr. Dexter, at home in the North.” Miserrimus Dexter lifted one of the truffles tenderly on his spike, and held it up to me in a favorable light. “Make the most of one of the few first sensations in this life which has no ingredient of disappointment lurking under the surface,” he said. “Look at it; meditate over it. You shall eat it, Mrs. Valeria, stewed in Burgundy!” He lighted the gas for cooking with the air of a man who was about to offer me an inestimable proof of his good-will.