he also threw in a pinch of sacred salt, that
sanatory crystalline dust which the Italian
physicians think essential to the wholesomeness
of this bouquet of raw vegetables. Their
alliterative proverb is

"Salata insalata no è sanata," (a salad
unsalted is not salubrious).

The Professor seldom failed, indeed, to quote
this saying, and also a pleasant companion to
it, which asserts that "after salad should come
wine;" not that the Professor wanted any strange
lore as excuse for a potation, and it was always
observed that the more potations he took the
more languages he talked, till at last, on the
giddy verge of a classical and polyglottic
inebriety, he became a Tower of Babel in himself,
and noisy as a cargo of monkeys in a gale of
wind.

And here, leaving the Professor at his salad
bowl, let us consider that great man's theory
that salads were invented by Adam and Eve.
"Your Milton," he used to observe, his
spectacles glittering as he spoke, " makes Adam and
Eve eat nectarines, and then dip out the water
from the brook in their dark crimson skins."
Better have eaten a salad in that hot weather
when the " fervid sun" shot down more warmth
than Adam needed. Let us see, he would
remark, if salads were invented in Eden. The
poet says:

And Eve within due at her hour [punctual, you see
—- that is the very starting point of a good
cook] prepared
For dinner savoury fruits, of taste to please
True appetite, and not disrelish thirst,
Of nectarous draught between, from milky stream
[give me pure water]—-
Berry or grape.

In another place Adam refers to drying fruit
(hence the incomparable Biffin); and Eve brings
for the dinner given to Raphael,

Fruit of all kinds in coat—-
Rough or smooth-rined, or bearded husk or shell—-
For drink the grape.
She crashes inoffensive must and meaths;
From many a berry, and from sweet kernels pressed
She tempers dulcet creams.

"Clearly," the Professor went on, "your
English Milton was wrong in forgetting to
introduce the salad— for in Eden it was probably
made of pomegranates, as it is still in Spain—
and among the green lettuces Eve no doubt
prettily sprinkled a scatter of rose-leaves. Ohne
zweifel!" the professor would say—"ohne
zweifel!" and then he would dash at the salad
mixture like a Bedlamite at the full of the moon.

Now, I do enjoy seeing a man have a good
"browse" of green-meat—a real hearty
Nebuchadnezzar meal. It is good for us carnivorous
animals to go out occasionally to grass. Such
also were the opinions of the worthy professor
of Jena, and the Q.C. smiles as he recals them
to mind, and memory's prism casts a flickering
rainbow of poetry over even the humble salad.

How is it that, wandering from my friend
the Q.C., concocting his salad at the Cock, I
got into the first floor of a restaurant in the
Rue Vivienne, and there, in company with a
German professor, somewhat of the pedant, I
began another bowl of salad, and have left that
also unfinished? What matter how it is? Even
an ox will shift his ground when he has set his
mind on browsing.

Yet once more behold me in ambuscade
behind the red curtains of the last bin but one
on the left-hand side of the Cock, watching the
Q.C. prepare his salad mixture at that open
table just northward of the fireplace. He has
rinced the lettuces like one does a hat that's got
wet; he has culled and arranged his " vegetable
store," as Goldsmith hath it; he has perfumed
the salad bowl, and prepared the sauce. He
now takes an onion forth, and, by cross cuts,
reduces a small bar of it to the finest
conceivable dice (no Florentine mosaicist ever
reduced his lapis lazuli to such small dice), and
these, half timidly, half proudly, he scatters
into the thick, turbid, yellow fluid. Next he
snatches up his knife and fork, and gashes
the lettuces and endive, and soaks the small
undergrowth of mustard and cress. He then slashes
into the soft green leaves with all the fervour of
a young haymaker, a woodman working by
contract, a forager afraid of surprise, and an Indian
grass-cutter anxious about tigers or on the edge
of a snaky jungle. Even the French horsemen
with the " long sword, saddle, bridle," never
slashed up the gay Mamelukes of Mourad Bey
half as fast in those green lentil fields at the foot
of the Pyramids. A moment ago the lettuces
were distinct plants, green-yellow umbrellas
without handles and with white milky stumps
for ferrules; now they are mere green square
segments glistening with oil and brown with
vinegar. There is a hatful of them to browse
upon.

The Q.C. smiles, and only wishes the German
professor could be witness of his present skill and
dexterity. He is an apt pupil of Epicurus, and
all this time his appetite is whetting at the
sight of the slowly-preparing dish. The salad
is all but ready: now, calling for another
bowl, the Q.C., with the deftness of an Indian
juggler, claps the empty bowl on the top of the
lull one, which he has first stirred with an
"energy divine," and reverses the contents of
the full one into the empty, so that the oil and
vinegar descend in a heavy soaking rain through
the pile of green leafage; the salad is at last
ready—- " a dish for the gods."

At this moment in comes the chop, of a
delicious brown; the gravy moistening its comely
plump cheek, settling here and there in the
dimples in little warm savoury pools, highly
appetising. Edward, the waiter, bruising the
leathery jacket of the potato dexterously in his
napkin, tumbles out the hot flour. A moment
after he appears with a pot of silvery-pewter full
of frothy stout. Kings, kaisers, princes, can all
your ragouts and fricandeaus match a homely
meal like this? Alderman of the fattest, your
calipash is trash compared to this.

A solitary club dinner is pleasant when you