something, somewhere, some time under a
hundred years ago, and can nose a dinner in
the lobby (the poor old fellow can hardly hold
his knife and fork for palsy, and the napkin
tucked under his wagging old chin looks like
a grave-cloth) with as much facility as Hamlet
stated the remains of King Claudius's
chamberlain might have been discovered. It is a
strong point in the Turrener and Lambswool
creed and practice to hold all cookery-books
—for any practical purpose beyond casual
reference—in great indifference, not to say
contempt. Sir Chyle has Glasse and Kitchener,
Austin and Ude, Francatelli and
Soyer, beside the Almanack des Gourmands,
and the Cuisinier Royal in his library,
gorgeously bound. He glances at them
occasionally, as Bentley might have done at a
dictionary or a lexicon; but he does not tie
himself nor does he bind his cook to blind
adherence to their rules. True cookery, in
his opinion, should rest mainly on tradition,
on experience, and, pre-eminently in the
inborn genius of the cook. Mrs. Lambswool
holds the same opinion, although she may
express it in different language. She may
never have heard of the axiom: " One becomes
a cook, but one is born a roaster;" but she
will tell you in her own homely language
that " roasting and biling comes nateral, and
some is good at it and some isn't." Her
master has told her the story of Vatel and
his fish martyrdom, but she holds his suicide
to have been rank cowardice. " If there
wasn't no fish," she remarks, " and it wasn't
his fault, why couldn't he have served up
something neat in the made-dish way, with a
bit of a speech about being drove up into a
corner?" But she hints darkly as to what
she would have done to the fishmonger.
Transfixure on a spit would have been too
good for him, a wretch.

Through long years of choice feeding
might this pair roll on, till the great epicure,
Death, pounces on Sir Chyle Turrener to
garnish his sideboard. If dainty pasture can
improve meat, he will be a succulent morsel.
He has fed on many things animate and
inanimate: Nature will return the compliment
then. For all here below is vanity,
and even good dinners and professed cooks
cannot last for ever. The fishes have had
their share of Lucullus, and Apicius has
helped to grow mustard and cress these
thousand years. So might the knight and the
cook roll on, I say; but a hundred to one
if they ever come in contact. The world
is very wide; and, although the heiress with
twenty thousand pounds, who has fallen in
love with us, lives over the way, we marry
the housemaid, and our heads grow grey, and
we die, and never reck of the heiress. Sir
Chyle Turrener may, at this moment, be
groaning in exasperation at an unskilful cook,
who puts too much pepper in his soup and
boils his fish to flakes; and Mrs. Lambswool's
next place may be with a north
country Squire with no more palate than
a boa-constrictor, who delights in nothing
half so much as a half raw beefsteak, or
a pie with a crust as thick as the walls of
the model prison, and calls made dishes
"kickshaws."

"As Good Cook in a private family," &c.,
&c., &c.,—the usual formula, with a hint as to
irreproachable character, and a published want
of objection to the country. The Good Cook
does not pretend to the higher mysteries of
the 'professed.' I doubt if she knows what a
bain-marie pan is, or what Mayonnaises, Salmis,
Sautés, Fricandeaux, Gratins or Soufflés
are. Her French is not even of the school of
' Stratford-atte-Bow,' and she does not
understand what a met is. Her stock made dishes
are veal cutlets, harico mutton, stewed eels
and Irish stew. She makes all these well;
and very good things they are in their way.
She is capital at a hand of pork and pea
soup; at pigeon pies; at roasting, boiling, frying,
stewing, and baking. She is great at
pies and puddings, and has a non-transcribed
receipt for plum pudding, which she would
not part with for a year's wages. She can
cook as succulent, wholesome, cleanly a dinner
as any Christian man need wish to sit down
to; but she is not an artist. Her dinners are
not in the " first style." She may do for
Bloomsbury, but not for Belgravia.

HOUSEMAID (where a footman is kept), a
respectable young woman, with three years' good
character. Address L.B., Gamms Court, Lamb's Conduit
Street.

Letitia Brownjohn, who wishes to be a
housemaid, who has three years' good character
(by her pronounced " krakter ") is
two-and-twenty years of age. Her father is a
smith, or a pianoforte maker, or a leather-
dresser, stifling with a large family in
Gamms Court. Her mother has been out
at service in her time, and Letitia is in the
transition state now—in the chrysalis formation
of domestic drudgery; which she hopes
to exchange some day for the full-blown
butterflyhood of a home, a husband, a
family, and domestic drudgery of her own.
Ah, Letitia, for all that you are worretted
now by captious mistresses, the time may
come when, in some stifling Gamms Court
of your own, sweltering over a washtub,
with a drunken husband and a brood of
ragged children, you may sigh for your quiet
kitchen, the cat, the ticking clock, the workbox
in the area window, and your cousin (in
the Guards) softly whispering and whistling
outside the area railings.

Letitia Brownjohn, like most other young
ladies of the housemaid calling, has had an
university education. Not, I need scarcely
tell, at theological Oxford or logarithmical
Cambridge; nor at the Silent Sisters, who
would not suit Letitia by any means; nor at
Durham, famous for its mustard and its
mines; nor at any one of those naughty