I remember when I was at the age when people began to call me _Backfisch_, and my mother dressed me in a little scarlet coat with big pearl buttons, and my eyes turned down because I was shy, and my nose turned up because I was impudent, one summer at the seaside with my governess we noticed in our walks a solitary lady of dignified appearance, who spoke to no one, and seemed for ever wrapped in distant and lofty philosophic speculations. "She's thinking about Kant and the nebular hypothesis," I decided to myself, having once heard some men with long beards talking of both those things, and they all had had that same far-away look in their eyes. "_Qu'est-ce que c'est une_ _hypothese nebuleuse_, _Mademoiselle_?" I said aloud. "_Tenez-vous bien_, _et marchez d'une facon convenable_," she replied sharply. "_Qu'est-ce que c'est une hypothese_--" "_Vous etes trap jeune pour comprendre ces choses_." "_Oh alors vous ne savez pas vous-meme_!" I cried triumphantly, "_Sans cela vous me diriez_." "_Elisabeth_, _vous ecrirez_, _des que nous rentrons_, _leverbe_ _Prier le bon Dieu de m'Aider a ne plus Etre si_ _Impertinente_." She was an ingenious young woman, and the verbs I had to write as punishments were of the most elaborate and complicated nature-- _Demander pardon pour Avoir Siffle comme un Gamin_ _quelconque_, _Vouloir ne plus Oublier de Nettoyer mes_ _Ongles_, _Essayer de ne pas tant Aimer les Poudings_, are but a few examples of her achievements in this particular branch of discipline. That very day at the _table d'hote_ the abstracted lady sat next to me. A _ragout_ of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken some she asked me, before helping herself, what it was. "Snails," I replied promptly, wholly unchastened by the prayers I had just been writing out in every tense. "Snails! _Ekelig_." And she waved the waiter loftily away, and looked on with much superciliousness at the rest of us enjoying ourselves. "What! You do not eat this excellent _ragout_?" asked her other neighbour, a hot man, as he finished clearing his plate and had time to observe the emptiness of hers. "You do not like calves' tongues and mushrooms? _Sonderbar._" I still can see the poor lady's face as she turned on me more like a tigress than the impassive person she had been a moment before. "_Sie_ _unverschamter Backfisch_!" she hissed. "My favourite dish--I have you to thank for spoiling my repast--my day!" And in a frenzy of rage she gripped my arm as though she would have shaken me then and there in the face of the multitude, while I sat appalled at the consequences of indulging a playful fancy at the wrong time. Which story, now I come to think of it, illustrates less the tremendous importance of food in our country than the exceeding odiousness of _Backfisch_ in scarlet coats.