say, at the Cock Tavern, that old hostelrie
mentioned by Pepys, and from which the
landlord fled for a time during the Great Plague,
and there, under covert of the brown shadow
of the comfortable old carved baked mantelpiece,
to watch a hungry, but luxurious Queen's
Counsel call for his salad, while the cloven
kidney, the brown juicy chop, or the slightly
crimsoned steak (delicious yet barbaric), are
patiently enduring their martyrdom upon the
adjacent gridiron that St. Lawrence for ever
consecrated.

Presently (culled from we know not what
Hesperian Gardens, near Battersea) comes
the bowl of green leafage, cool and pleasant
to look on as the days grow warmer. The
Q.C., weary of arid parchment and tape the
colour of men's heart strings, smiles blandly as
it appears, for the calenture of London is upon
him, and he would fain babble of green fields
and budding hedges, such as those which hid his
first bird's nest, and the pallid waiter smiles
too, for the lettuces are green and dewy, and
it freshens even a parboiled man to look on
them. I, in ambush behind my dull red curtain,
watch the loving way with which the Q.C. lifts
out the first crumply lettuce. The moist gardens
of Fulham never produced a better. But to
hide his self complacency, he asks the waiter
snappishly if they haven't any more oil in the
house, holds up reproachfully the almost empty
cruet glass, and with the air of an alchemist
letteth the last teaspoonful of golden fluid
trickle lazily down towards the broken stopper.
He then shaketh angrily the vinegar, as if irritated
at its being full and furnishing no subject
for complaint, and then sniffeth at it as if it
were smelling salts, and long fasting had made
him faint. This for the outer vulgar; but
with inward calm the Q.C. proceeds with his
agreeable and appetising task, on the great,
Göthe principle, "never hurrying, never resting."
A gentle Pharisaism is diffusing itself through
his mind. Really too lazy and hungry to go so
far as his West-end club, he is persuading
himself that he is saving money and dining
quite as pleasantly Eastward. As he sprinkles
the floor with the second half of the wet lettuce
he secretly repeats a quotation from Doctor
William King's pleasant poem, The Art of
Cookery:

Happy the man that has rich Fortune tried,
To whom she much has given, much denied;
With abstinence all delicates he sees,
And can regale himself on toast and cheese.

Nevertheless, philosopher as our Q.C. is, I
feel no doubt he will sum up with a pint of Mr.
Tennyson's old port, and will then walk on to
his club to compare it with the Pall Mall
vintage of the "comet year."

The floor as well sprinkled with the lettuce
as a cathedral pavement with a priest's
aspersoir, our Q.C., with a cunning look, doth
next dive his hand into the blue willow-pattern
bowl and sorts his vegetables. With what
smiling search he forages out the little shining
bald onions, whose dainty white roots are small as
threads of cotton; with what triumph he draws
forth the little white frills of the bleached endive.
How disapprovingly and sternly he notices the
absence of that French luxury, the little leaflet
of innocuous tarragon. How in almost a judicial
way he severs the young cucumber, and lets fall
its transparent sections into the magic caldron.
With a light hand he tosses in the tiny growth
of mustard and cress (hot and cool so pleasantly
allied), and now his fingers advance towards
the cruet standing there patiently with its
company of ministering bottles; but first he
cracks, unshells, and severs the egg, forgetful
of the fowl it might have been, and scoops out
with dainty care the hard ball of yellow flour.
With what a loving firmness, crushing the globe
with the bowl of a teaspoon, he liquefies it into
a delicious sauce!

"Remember, Q.C.," I long to cry, thrusting
my head in an exhorting way, between the dusty
red curtains, " remember the fine old proverb:

"A good salad requires a spendthrift to put
in the oil, a miser to pour the vinegar, a wise
man to add the mustard, and a madman to stir
it all up."

But the Q.C. has not forgotten those pleasant
'little dinners he used to have at that
restaurant in the Rue Vivienne, at that cool
first-floor window that commanded a view of
the jeweller's shop,

"La Reine Topaze,"

and of the quiet though lively street below,
upon whose pavement the fitful lamplight ever
fell so softly. He has not forgotten the precepts
of that eminent viveur, the German professor,
who preached so largely and frequently
upon the salad, and allowed no profane hands
to touch the component parts but his own.
With what exquisite and learned unction the
worthy Dr. Dreikopf used to first poise and
ring with a snap of his finger the china bowl
before he began, as the juggler does the plate
he is about to send spinning through the air.
He used to scrutinise the vessel as a pagan
priest would have done, with holy awe, a
vessel prepared for a sacrifice. Next, taking a
young onion, he perfumed it with a light and
playful touch. Next with a wise chemistry he
prepared a large silver tablespoon, and filled
it four times with the finest oil of Lucca— pure,
sweet and golden as ever green Italian olive
berry yielded. Four times the oil to one of vinegar
gar, that was Herr Professor's great and primary
maxim. "Want of oil," using a rather scattered
metaphor, " was," he said, " the great
rock on which English salad makers always
split." That golden sea was the ocean to which
all other liquids and solids were to be mere
subsidiaries— one brimming spoonful of brown
vinegar the Professor (our Q.C. distinctly
remembers) next, with exulting generosity, proud
as a witch of her second spell, dashed into the
enchanted caldron. The mustard he then
added, by instinct, to infuse a flavour and a
kindly warmth into the acute vinegar and the
lubricating and emollient oil. Then and there