'In love at First Sight.'

It would be speaking with inexcusable rudeness to say plainly that she told him a lie. Let the milder form of expression be, that she modestly concealed the truth. I don't know anything about it,' she said.

I do,' Amelius remarked smartly. She persisted in looking at the illustration. Was there an infection of imbecility in that fatal work? She was too simple to understand him, even yet! You do what?' she inquired innocently.

I know what love at first sight is,' Amelius burst out.

Regina turned over the leaves of the Magazine. 'Ah,' she said, 'you have read the story.'

'I haven't read the story,' Amelius answered. 'I know what I felt myself-on being introduced to a young lady.'

She looked up at him with a smile. A young lady in America?' she

asked.

'In England, Miss Regina.' He tried to take her hand-but she was too quick for him. 'In London,' he went on, drifting back into his customary plainness of speech. In this very street,' he resumed; seizing her hand before she was aware of him. Too much bewildered to know what else to do, Regina took refuge desperately in shaking hands with him.

Good-bye,' Mr. Goldenheart,' she said, giving him his dismissal for the second time.

Amelius submitted to his fate; there was something in her eyes which warned him that he had ventured far enough for that day.

'May I call again soon?' he asked piteously.

'No!' answered a voice at the door which they both recognised-the voice of Mrs. Farnaby.

"Yes!' Regina whispered to him, as her aunt entered the room. Mrs. Farnaby's interference (following on the earlier events of the day) had touched the young lady's usually plac

able temper in a tender place-and Amelius reaped the benefit of it.

Mrs. Farnaby walked straight up to him, put her hand in his arm, and led him into the hall.

I had my suspicions,' she said and I find they have not misled me. Twice already, I have warned you to let my niece alone. For the third and last time, I tell you that she is as cold as ice. She will trifle with you as long as it flatters her vanity; and she will throw you over, as she has thrown other men over. Have your fling, you foolish fellow, before you marry anybody. Pay no more visits to this house, unless they are visits to me. I shall expect to hear from you.' She paused, and pointed to a statue which was one of the ornaments in the hall. Look at that bronze woman with the clock in her hand. That's Regina. Be off with you-good bye!'

Amelius found himself in the street. Regina was looking out at the diningroom window. He kissed his hand to her she smiled and bowed. 'Damn the other men!' Amelius said to himself. I'll call on her to-morrow.'

RE

CHAPTER XI.

ETURNING to his hotel, he found three letters waiting for him on

the sitting-room table.

The first letter that he opened was from his landlord, and contained his bill for the past week. As he looked at the sum-total, Amelius presented to perfection the aspect of a serious young man. He took pen, ink, and paper, and made some elaborate calculations. Money that he had too generously lent, or too freely given away, appeared in his statement of expenses, as well as money that he had spent on himself. The result may be plainly stated in his own words: Good-bye to the hotel; I must go into lodgings.'

Having arrived at this wise decision, he opened the second letter. It proved

to be written by the lawyers who had already communicated with him at Tadmor, on the subject of his inheritance. 'Dear Sir, The enclosed, insufficiently addressed as you will perceive, only reached us this day. We beg to remain, &c.'

Amelius opened the letter enclosed, and turned to the signature for information. The name instantly took him back to the Community: the writer was Mellicent.

Her letter began abruptly, in these terms:

'Do you remember what I said to you when we parted at Tadmor? I said, "Be comforted, Amelius, the end is not yet." And I said again, “You will come back to me."

'I remind you of this, my frienddirecting to your lawyers, whose names I remember when their letter to you was publicly read in the Common Room. Once or twice a year I shall continue to remind you of those parting words of mine: there will be a time perhaps when you will thank me for doing so.

In the meanwhile, light your pipe with my letters; my letters don't matter. If I can comfort you, and reconcile you to your life-years hence, when you too, Amelius, may be one of the Fallen Leaves like me then I shall not have lived and suffered in vain; my last days on earth will be the happiest days that I have ever seen.

'Be pleased not to answer these lines, or any other written words of mine that may follow, so long as you are prosperous and happy. With that part of your life I have nothing to do. You will find friends wherever you go -among the women especially. Your generous nature shows itself frankly in your face; your manly gentleness and sweetness speak in every tone of your voice; we poor women feel drawn towards you by an attraction which we are not able to resist. Have you fallen in love already with some beautiful English girl? O, be careful and prudent! Be sure, before you set

your heart on her, that she is worthy of you! So many women are cruel and deceitful. Some of them will make you believe you have won their love, when you have only flattered their vanity; and some are poor weak creatures whose minds are set on their own interests, and who may let bad advisers guide them, when you are not by. Take care, my friend-take

care!

'I am living with my sister, at New York. The days and weeks glide by me quietly; you are in my thoughts and prayers-I have nothing to complain of, I wait and hope. When the time of my banishment from the Community has expired, I shall go back to Tadmor; and there you will find me, Amelius, the first to welcome you when your spirits are sinking under the burden of life, and your heart turns again to the friends of your early days.

Good-bye, my dear-good-bye!'" Amelius laid the letter aside, touched and saddened by the artless devotion to him which it expressed. He was conscious also of a feeling of uneasy surprise, when he read the lines which referred to his possible entanglement with some beautiful English girl. Here (with widely different motives) was Mrs. Farnaby's warning repeated, by a stranger writing from another quarter of the globe! It was an odd coincidence, to say the least of it. After thinking for a while, he turned abruptly to the third letter that was waiting for him. He was not at ease, his mind felt the need of relief.

The third letter was from Rufus. Dingwell; announcing the close of his tour in Ireland, and his intention of shortly joining Amelius in London. The excellent American expressed, with his customary absence of reserve, his fervent admiration of Irish hospitality, Irish beauty, and Irish whisky. 'Green Erin wants but one thing more,' Rufus predicted,' to be a Paradise on earth-it wants the day to come when we shall send an American

'TELL

BY FREDERICK

ПELL me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,' says Brillat Savarin-Counsellor in the French Court of Cassation in 1826, and notable for having written one of the best books of gastronomic gossip extant-and physiology more than bears him out, for, given the food, it is not impossible to tell what may be, to predicate the combination of animal tissue which that food will produce, and as the relationship between mind and body is very close, to draw no insecure conclusions as to mental powers and moral bent. Indeed one writer has gone so far as to propose a system of dieting our children so as to create in them the capacity for the life of the soldier, the statesman, or the poet, upon the principle exercised in the community of bees, where, by a certain judicious course of feeding, the eggs of commoners are made to develop into the full blown magnificence of the Queen. Certainly some constitutions, from perhaps hereditary causes, lend themselves more readily to the influences of food than others.

Savarin says:-'The gourmands by predestination can be easily told. They have broad faces, sparkling eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and round chins. The females are plump, pretty rather than handsome, with a tendency to embonpoint. It is under this exterior that the pleasantest guests are found. Those, on the contrary, to whom Nature has refused an aptitude for the enjoyments of taste have long faces, long noses, and large eyes they have black and straight hair. It is they who invented trou

A. DIXON, OTTAWA.

sers.

The women, whom nature has afflicted with the same misfortune, are angular, get tired at table, and live on tea and scandal.'

Though both Lord Byron and Goethe objected to seeing women eat, and the affectations of fashion for a long time made healthy appetite in the female a thing of shame, Monsieur Savarin thought differently, and says:

The penchant of the fair sex for gourmandise has in it something of the nature of instinct, for gourmandise is favourable to beauty. A train of

exact and rigid observations has demonstrated that a succulent, delicate and careful regimen repels to a distance and for a length of time the external appearances of old age. It gives more brilliancy to the eyes, more freshness to the skin, more support to the muscles, it keeps off wrinkles.'

If such be the results of judicious dining, how noble an art are we discussing. What honour is not due to cookery, what praise to cooks?

Voltaire declares that the fate of nations often depends on the good or bad digestion of a premier, and it appears to be well borne out by good authority that Napoleon, at the battle of Leipsic, was suffering so severely from indigestion, caused by a hurriedly bolted dinner of roast leg of mutton, that he could not command his tactical powers, and so lost the day. History shows that it is expedient that its makers should dine well.

But the history of cookery carries with it morals for nations as well as for individuals. Victory over the

luxurious on the part of the simple has always been injurious to the victors. To go back no further, the conquest of Asia brought about the destruction of the Roman empire, and a nation of hardy warriors grew to be a nation of effeminate voluptuous sots and sensualists, whom the northern hordes which swept down upon them found no difficulty in mastering. When Charles VIII. overran Italy and stripped Florence, fighting his way successfully back to France, he carried with him seeds of national ruin in the shape of Italian cooks and a taste for the elegant refinements of Italian cookery. This taste culminated in the frightful excesses of the thoughtless and spendthrift courts of Louis Quatorze, Louis Quinze, and Louis Seize, and a certain unamiable convention of which Robespierre, Danton and Marat were the heads, when that dexterous damsel, "La Guillotine," took from aristocratic mouths for ever the possibility of tasting the delights of filet de poulet à la Pompadour.

When Adam delved and Eve span -to go back to purely primitive times -it was probably a matter of great indifference to the worthy pair whether their salad had the proper dressing or not. No Chevalier d'Aubigné had at that time risen to show them how to mix a salad; and it is to be feared that the 80,000 francs that good gentleman made by his talents as salad

maker would never have come to him had he lived in the garden of Eden. Then, and for long after that unfortunate little affair with the apple, they had not learned to dine. They only fed. Man, and woman too, probably had a palate, but did not know it. Still, nevertheless, on went its cultivation, slowly but surely, through the savoury stew of kid's flesh and the lumps of flattened dough, baked in the ashes, which served prince and people in the days of the patriarchs ;-through the grand orgies of the Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian courts, onward to the zenith of its cultivation, which,

after long years, should be reached at a kingly table in giddy, greedy, gourmandizing France.

But of all this, of the glorious feastings of Sardanapalus, of the Kings of Tyre and Sidon, of the banquets of Darius and the 10,000 guests whom Alexander the Great feasted in silver chairs there is no time now to speak; still the mighty halls of the Pharoahs saw mighty banquetings, and the creators of the Temple of Isis and the Eleusinean mysteries were, no doubt, worthy progenitors of the monastic houses whose good cheer rejoiced later days.

Let us take up the thread of this history of aristology-no bad name for the science, by the way-at the point where gluttony and gourmandise had preeminently become a vice amongst the heads of a great people, and stretching down into its very heart had fitted it for its decay-the period of Rome's greatest wealth and luxury-the period about the first century of the Christian era.

These were palmy days for cooks, and a great part of the mercantile world was taken up with the operations of supplying the complex requirements of the kitchen. They were learned fellows, too, and authors, and it is a pity that their complex works have only come down to us in the fragments quoted by that wonderful gossiper about the ancient table-Athenæus in 170 B. C. The Greek bakers, following in the wake of the victorious armies of the Republic on their return from Macedonia, revolutionized the simple tastes of the Romans, and with their seventy-two different composi tions of bread, showed the conquerors of the world the road to a new conquest -they marched along it like heroes, and Rome learned to dine. It would be impossible here to do more than simply suggest to the mind the lavish extravagance of the Roman dinner of its palmy days-the perfection of the art of cookery-the devotion of its votaries the ability of its priests. A