the final pie, though born of apple, sugar, butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, is like none of these, but the compound ideal of them all, refined, purified, and by fire fixed in blissful perfection." "Do you eat pie?" was once asked of Emerson. "What is pie for?" was the ready and philosophic reply. "Pie, often foolishly abused," said Artemus Ward, "is a good creature at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees, although in semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate stomachs." But think of the pies of two centuries ago! To appreciate the improvement which has taken place in the dessert and the preparation of sweet entremets, one has only to refer to Mrs. Glasse or contemporaneous and previous treatises on cookery. One marvels equally at the strange recipes, the assimilative prowess of the dames of yore, and the progress of the centuries. Canon Barham, who never fails to introduce his bills of fare, though these may not always be strictly reliable from the point of view of the times and the manner of the service, presents this in "The Lay of St. Romwold" as the termination of an olden feast: "Then came 'sweets'--served in silver were tartlets and pies in glass, Jellies composed of punch, calves' feet, and isinglass, Creams and whipt-syllabubs, some hot, some cool, Blancmange, and quince-custards, and goosberry-fool." This was long before the dessert proper--from the French _desservir_, to clear the table--became an established course of the dinner; and when the sweetened dishes of eld might scarcely figure under the pretty Italian title of _Giardinetto_, or "little garden," sometimes applied to the dessert, and suggestive of all that is fragrant and ambrosial. While there is no reason for supposing that sweet champagne was not as greatly relished by the women of Colonial times as it is to-day, it is true, notwithstanding, that, owing to the greater need of economy, they were obliged to be content for the most part with saccharine tipples of a less expensive nature. Among such, besides mulled wine, was the sack-posset, a favourite drink at weddings and social festivities, borrowed from England, with its numerous ingredients, and favoured alike by miss and matron. The recipe in rhyme for this concoction, after Sir Fleetwood Fletcher, soon became as familiar as Sydney Smith's recipe for salad in the following century: "A recipe for all Young Ladies that are going to be Married. To make a Sack-Posset: