gently as a coin from a mould, comes the
plastic flesh. We toss it into the bed of
lettuce leaves, and prepare for the sauce. We
make it like Mrs. Rundall, but with this
difference, that we put more oil and less vinegar,
and we do not forget essence of anchovy,
mushroom ketchup, hard-boiled eggs, or a
little mollifying cream, that lubricates everything
like good-nature does life.

Mashed potato, rubbed down with cream,
mustard, and salt, is no bad substitute for egg,
and imparts to a salad a new and not
unpleasing flavour. Tomatoes— those warm orange
lobed tropical "pommes d'amour"— are excellent
too in a salad. Their rich-flavoured pulp and
skin, warm as capsicums, are incomparable, if
well spread and diffused on a proper friendly
footing with the other ingredients. French
beans, too, the most delicate of vegetables, make
a salad of great merit. You must boil the beans
as usual for the table, then mix a dressing in the
following proportions:

Four mustard ladles of mustard,
Four salt ladles of salt,
Three dessert-spoonfuls of essence of anchovy
Four ditto of mushroom ketchup,
Three ditto of the best Italian oil,
Twelve ditto of vinegar,
Three unboiled eggs.

The Spanish use pomegranates in their
salads. For myself I dislike that fruit, with
the shell like baked clay. The Arab poets may
compare the lips of those they love to the rosy,
fleshy pips of the pomegranate, but to my mind
the acid is of an uninteresting, insipid, and
rather disagreeable character. Perhaps they
are grateful to men choked with the dusty
heat of a Spanish summer; but when one can
pick from the green parent tree an orange just
yellowing, who would eat the poor watery fruit
of Granada? Still, to the epicure, eager for
novelty, the thing is worth a trial— at the worst it
is only a bowl of salad to be thrown away; for
depend upon it servants won't eat what their
masters dislike.

In the time of the Regency an old French
emigré of taste and refinement, an epicurean
marquis, who had, perhaps, often supped at the
Petit Trianon, with the thoughtless, laughing
ladies of poor Marie Antoinette, or revelled
with Egalité in the Palais Royal, on dishes
rarer and stranger than even nightingale's
brains, or stewed canaries— attended parties
at the West-end as a preparer of salads. He
carried with him a mahogany case full of sauces
and essences, and the result was (well only a
Spaniard could express it by joining the tips
of his five joined fingers and then blowing them
apart with a kiss)—-

"Whew! Perfection!"

The old emigré made a fortune, and returned
with the Bourbons to regenerate the French
with a new salad mixture. Ventre de St. Gris!
that man would have deserved a London statue
as much as the Duke of York or Jenner, had he
only left us his recipe.

If tradition be correct, the Roi de la salade
constructed his finest work somewhat on these
lines:

He chopped up three anchovies with a little
shallot and some parsley; these he threw into
a bowl, with a little mustard and salt, two
table-spoonfuls of oil, and one brimming over
of vinegar; when madly mixed he added to
these extremely thin short slices of Westphalia
ham, or the finest roast beef, which he first
steeped in the seasoning. He then covered
the bowl, and in three hours the salad was fit
for table. He garnished with parsley and a
few wafers of bacon. Perfection is not the
word. A dying man would get up to taste
that salad. Let that salad be the touchstone
of all French cooks. Let it be the first question
to aspirants, "Do you know how to construct
('make' is a word degrading to the grand
science)— do you know, monsieur, how to
construct the Salade des Hesperides?" If the
wretch says "No," look down again on your
blotting-paper, bow, and glance at the door. As
the Count de M. once said to Talleyrand of a
candidate for a secretaryship:

"I have no great opinion of this man's
mind; he has never eaten pudding à la Richelieu,
and he does not know the cutlet à la
Soubise."

As Brillat Saverin says, profoundly, " It is
chiefly men of intellect who hold good eating in
honour; the herd is not capable of a mental
operation, which consists in a long sequence of
appreciations and many severe decisions of the
judgment."

FOREIGN OFFICE MIDGES.

IT is now about fifteen years since we
called attention to the very serious evil of the
Agency system at the Foreign Office. We
pointed out that it really did give rise in practice
to very great abuse in the disposal of public
offices in that important department. The Agents
were the senior clerks in the Foreign Office,
and they invariably contrived by some art or
mystery known to themselves, to obtain absolute
control over the acts of every succeeding minister
who was nominally responsible to Parliament.
We mentioned the notorious fact that officers
employed abroad in the service of the country,
were afraid to draw their salaries when due,
because it had been ascertained through experience
that it was better for a man's professional
prospects that he should let his balance
accumulate with an Agent who had control over his
professional career; and that it was more prudent,
all things considered, to borrow money
even at the high rates of interest prevailing in
foreign countries, than to disturb a balance
which might be looked upon without any great
effort of imagination, as a deposit to secure
promotion. We added, that it was well known
that instances had occurred of embezzlement on
the part of these Agents; and that, generally,
officers who submitted to the loss and hardship
entailed on them by this abuse were rewarded