poor Englishwoman, who has never heard of half the vegetables that are in a French kitchen garden. Madame insinuates some twenty cheap and toothsome ways of cooking cabbages, and her ideas about haricots are infinite. She can make a dish of cooked watercresses; these are a cheap and agreeable substitute for spinach; her lettuce au jus is a delicate dish, and her lettuce stalks au blanc should be tried by the experimental philosopher. So orderly and thorough is madame, that she opens her chapter on turnips by dividing them into three categories. She has a civil word to say of onions, and of the shabby, backstairs way people have of liking them; and then she suggests an onion salad garnished with salt herrings, and a salad of potatoes, beetroot, and onions. It seems that the parsley root, cooked like salsifis is of fine flavour; that dandelion, either as a salad or boiled, is an excellent vegetable; and that mange-tout peas are a precious resource for the housewife. I have seen them in nearly every Continental market, but never in England. On potatoes madame reads farmers' and workmen's wives a lecture, telling them the baked is more valuable than the boiled, and that Belgian housewives set a good example to their French sisters in peeling potatoes, instead of wastefully cutting off the skin, the part nearest the skin being the better part. Madame's suggestions for making good dishes with potatoes and a few herbs would revolutionise a poor Irish family.

It is true, as madame says, that in France there are salads to any taste, of any form, and of every colour. But try to teach a countryman in England to eat a mallow salad, or one of dandelion and chervil. He begins and ends with a lettuce. Even this he cannot mix properly. Madame tells him that lettuce, with a little vinegar, salt, and melted bacon fat, will make him a good dish. A salad of hard eggs and watercresses is recommended. From vegetables and salads the farmer's gracious guide travels through fish, flesh, and fowl, offering, by the way, a hundred suggestions for contriving new dishes out of the simplest materials. Her omelettes are a little book in themselves. The confidence with which she recommends her dainty combinations to her poor countrymen, shows the knowledge of culinary matters which they have already, and how apt are the scholars to whom she appeals. She has in view exclusively the French ménagères who have the old domestic proverb hanging somewhere near the festoon of dried carrots (for the soup), Tout vient à point qui tient ménage.' Her hope of success lies in the general resolve to save, out of the hardest life, something to cover old bones in the setting sun.

The resolve is very curiously illustrated in the domestic economy proverbs of French country people. You must be able to save a pear until you are thirsty. The house is built with farthings. You must not buy your wood or your coal when it

freezes. Three movings are equivalent to a fire. Provide in the summer for the winter, if you would avoid want. Proverbs of this kind are ever on the lips of the working French, and this concentration of their minds on the principle of saving keeps them alive to every suggestion that gives promise of economy. The French peasant was easily taught, by Monsieur Raspail, to drink burrage tea, and to delight in the aroma of it.

Let any social doctor who may be anxious to test the pliability of the English agricultural labourer, as a pupil, accost him with the following proposition: My good man, I have, I assure you, from the bottom of my heart, the liveliest interest in your welfare. Now the tea you drink is detestable, adulterated, and very dear stuff. It does you no good: now take my advice, grow burrage, which will cost you nothing, and drink burrage tea. It helps digestion, is a sudorific, has a delightful aroma, and will have no bad effects on your nerves, or the nerves of your wife.'

I am lost in conjectures as to the fate that would befal the doctor. He might be bonneted, elbowed into a briar hedge, reminded that the horse-pond was near, or recommended to confine his attention to his own tea-cup. But the unlikeliest result of all, would be thanks for his suggestion; no, no, the unlikeliest would be the trial of it.

'Then why, my dear Fin-Bec,' Mr. Bloomsbury Baker whispered in my ear (he calls me Fin

Bec, tout court, already-but then he is a man who Prince Bismarck's button-hole when he

holds likes),

why do you advance your friend, Madame Michaux ?'

I lead the forlorn hope. Perhaps somebody may make her acquaintance, and enter upon a village campaign. I promise a dozen pots to begin with, to the first twelve pioneers.'

CHAPTER XI.

THE RULER OF THE ROAST.

THE Ruler of the Roast lives in the Faubourg St. Denis. Where else should he live, if not in that most bustling of Paris streets, which has escaped the hand of the Baron Haussmann; and, by some miraculous chance, has not been fired, nor pulled down for barricade materials by the shirtless lovers of liberty, the begrimed advocates of equality, and the armed wranglers for fraternity? It lies in the thick of that devoted part of the capital which certain gentlemen in blouses, and with short pipes, have mapped out as the battle-field of the regeneration of the human race. Somewhere near the torrid spot where the Ruler of the Roast standshis thumbs glistening with the rich flavour of his spits-the staff of some Pipe-en-Bois will gather presently to put the world to rights, by a general emptying of people's pockets to begin with. But, for the moment, Monsieur Tournebroche is lord paramount in a kingdom of geese, fowls, turkeys, rabbits, hares, and rows of joints of meat, that lie prone to his broad hands, and within reach of his twinkling eye. How artfully he has disposed them

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