TOWN AND COUNTRY HOSPITALITY.

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trary, at least very different, is the case of a London friend visiting a country-house. He relieves dullness. He brings with him the very thing wanted, information, and some excitement. He asks for a little repose, not half a dozen exhibitions and entertainments as many miles apart. He is accustomed to spare servants and to measure their strength; and even were he not so disposed, he can't keep a poor maid going up and down stairs the whole day on trifling errands which he could either despatch himself or manage to comprise in one commission. The great difference of hours between London and country life itself alone prevents Londoners from making their houses hotels. They are bound to nurse their strength during the day for the hard work of the evening, and, in the case of Parliamentary people, of the night too. Country people can never be made to see the difference between a man who has not been able to get to bed till three in the morning, and the man who had been sound asleep for an hour when the clock struck twelve. It is a positive duty to state the case of the Londoners, for they are exposed to much suspicion and obloquy; the country folks meanwhile arrogating to themselves that hospitality is pre-eminently a provincial virtue.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE TOWN GOURMAND.

THERE was the town gourmand, an unfortunate attorney cursed with a fastidious taste, and probably a diseased liver, who every morning went the round of the fish-market and the poulterers, to see if they had anything he could eat. He had to seek food in desolate places. The fish I most remember were haddock, hake, halibut, and eels. Trent salmon was very rare; and, with no railways, no steamboats, and even very few land conveyances, the best sea fish only came by fits and starts. Lobsters, I think, were rare, but crabs were abundant, cheap, and of all sizes. Cooked in various ways, they were the chief treats of my childhood, and in after years I used to get up a good imitation of crab by mixing up cheese, mustard, and vinegar. But our tastes were simple enough. Nothing pleased us so much as 'frumetty,' from frumentum—wheat or barley boiled in milk, with a few currants and a little sugar. For a change we used to enjoy 'maslin' bread, made from wheat, barley, and rye, grown together in one crop, as I remember. The wheat gave strength, the barley sweetness, and the rye the quality of keeping moist and sound for weeks. The word, I suppose, is short for 'miscellaneous.'

As to butcher's meat in Lincolnshire—at that time at least the sheep were large and woolly, and the

beef was also large and coarse, often tasting of oilcake. Indifferent as the beef and mutton were, they were often dear, a leg of mutton sometimes twenty shillings of the currency. For a change upon oily beef and woolly mutton, people had then to be content with 'hollow fowl,' as poultry, ducks, and rabbits were alike called. There were extensive rabbitwarrens at no great distance from Gainsborough, and parts of the Isle of Axholme had been given up to rabbits from time immemorial. It was a question whether they did not pay better than sheep. But, cooked as they might be, a bon vivant would soon weary of them.

But I am forgetting the universal refuge and unfailing resource of country households. What would they do without poor piggy and his long-expected effects? There was nothing we children liked better than a boiled leg of pork, with pease-pudding. If a country gentleman offers it in these days to an old college friend on a week's visit, it is with an apology, for auld acquaintance' sake. Even a spare-rib is hardly now producible. How we did relish 'pig's fry,' ay, the very odour of it long before the appearance. It is scarcely credible now that within this century a sucking-pig could find a place in a Parisian menu: even De Quincey has not been able to keep it in the front of civilisation. I daresay many of my readers never heard of 'black puddings,' whether in sausage form or en masse; or of 'beast's heart,' or of—well, I must stop, but they were all once familiar and dear ; and they now survive in association with my native town. Yet, before I close the list, another well

remembered dish demands a place in it. I suppose 'bubble and squeak' is hardly admissible at a banquet. We appreciated it intensely, but seemed to feel it required exalted sanction. George IV. was said to have bestowed on it his distinguished approbation. Yet I remember once, when the bearer of an old Scotch name dropped in at an early dinner and found nothing but bubble and squeak' on the table, we felt that we might be somewhat lowered in his estimation. It might be so, but he enjoyed the dish amazingly.

My apology for these gross details is the universal fact that nothing survives more than the tastes and aromas familiar to early life. Many meats and drinks intolerable to the novice are delicious to the accustomed. The appetite survives, and even becomes a craving, perhaps in the very agonies of declining power. I remember seeing, with positive alarm, justified by the result, an elderly gentleman, who had spent his early life in the country and his later in town, devouring bacon and beans like a labourer. I remember seeing another swallowing shrimps with such zest as to detach them very imperfectly from their indigestible integuments. I have had to protest in vain against an aged labourer chipping cheese into the cup of tea his nurse had prepared for him. What matters it?' she said. 'He can only live a few days. Let him enjoy his self while he can.' In Devonshire the prospect of a serious and painful illness is much. mitigated by the hope of unlimited 'double-bakes.' This is a hard insipid biscuit that I have little doubt is the fouós, or sop, formerly used for a spoon,

and now given to Devonshire children at teething and whenever they want special comfort. So fond are the labourers of it that I have often seen a stock kept in a small drawer under the bar of a publichouse.

But even if mutton palled, and beef surfeited, and fowls failed, and fish were neither good nor fresh, and 'pig's meat' had been tried in every form in vain, there was the great succedaneum of cheese. I don't suppose the poor bilious attorney would venture far that way, but, as a fact, the Stilton cheese, though last, was not least in the Gainsborough bill of fare. Some months before a great occasion a hospitable gentleman laid in a remarkably fine large Stilton cheese. Neatly separating the top he made a large hole in the interior, which he filled with old port. Being the best pickle for the living subject, it was presumably the best sauce for all kinds of food. The top of the cheese was then replaced, and the whole put into a closed jar in the pantry. After the dinner, and a suitable announcement, the mighty incubation was placed on the table, and the top carefully lifted. The cheese had to be carried instantly out of the room and thrown away, as far from the house as possible.

Notwithstanding its lowly and homely character, cheese affords a greater variety of national shape and historical change than any other food. It was the staple of the Roman soldier and working-man, but not in the solid and massy form we are acquainted with. It is but a name and a struggling survival at the English dinner-table. In Sweden, I have been told, all the guests, before taking their places at the table,