revenues would have been expended in
glaziers' bills. But there were dinners and
suppers and after-suppers. The guests ate
till they couldn't move, and drank till they
couldn't see. Of course they crowned
themselves with flowers, and lolled upon soft
couches, and had little boys to titillate their
noses with rare perfumes, and pledged each
other to the sounds of dulcet music; but
they were an emerited set of gormandisers
for all that, and richly deserved the visitation
of the stern Nemesis that sate ever in the
gate in the shape of the fair-haired
barbarian, with the brand to burn, the sword to
slay, and the hands to pillage. Or, like the
Philistine lords, they caroused and made
merry, unwittinig of that stern, moody,
blind Samson, sitting apart, yonder, with his
hair all a-growing, and soon to arise in his
might and pull the house down on their
gluttonous heads. Or, like Belshazzar's
feasters, they were drunk in vessels of gold
and silver, while the fingers of a man's hand
were writing on the wall, and the Medes
and Persians were at the gate.

It may easily be imagined that in such a
belly-god temple—such a house of feasting
and wassail the cook was a personage of
great power and importance. Pomponius
Cotta had simply the best cook not only in
Genoa, but in Magna Graecia—not only in
Magna Græcia, but in the whole Italian
peninsula. But no man-cook had he–no
haughty, stately, magister coquinæ, no pedant
in Apicius or bigoted believer in Lucullus.
Yet Pomponius was proud and happy in the
possession of a culinary treasure—a real
cordon-bleu, a Mrs. Glasse of the dark ages,
a Miss Acton of antiquity, a Mrs. Rumball
of Romanity; and this was no other than
a little slave girl whom they called Zita.

We have all heard of the cook who
boasted that he could serve up a leathern
shoe in twenty-seven different phases of
sauce and cookery. I never believed in him,
and always set him down as a vapouring
fanfaroon—a sort of copper-stewpan captain
of cookery. But I have a firm belief that
little Zita would have made everything out
of anything or nothing culinary; that her
stewed pump-handles would have been
delicious, her salmi of bath-brick exquisite,
her croquettes of Witney blanket
unapproachable, her back hair en papillote a dish
fit for a king. She cooked such irresistible
dishes for the noble Pompouius that he
frequently wept, and would have given her
freedom had he not been afraid that she
would be off and be married: that the noble
Domina Pomponia was jealous of her, and
would have led her a sorry life, had she
dared to cross her husband; that the guests
of the Pomponian house wrote bad sapphics
and dactylics in her praise, and would have
given her necklaces of pearl and armlets of
gold for gifts, but that the Roman finances
were in rather an embarrassed condition
just then, and that poor trust was dead with
the Genoese jewellers.

Little Zita was very pretty; she must
have been pretty and she was. She was
as symmetrical as one of Pradier's
Bacchantes as ripe and blooming as the grapes
they press; but as pure as the alabaster of
which they are made. Her complexion was
as delicately, softly tinted as one of Mr.
Gibson's Anglo-Roman statues; her long
hair, when she released it from its confining
fillet, hung down about her like a king's
mantle; she had wrists and ankles that only
gold or gems were worthy to embrace: she
had a mouth like a Cupid's bow, and eyes
like almonds dyed in ebony; and teeth that
were the gates of ivory of the dreams of love,
and nails like mother of pearl. She danced
liks Arbuscula, and sang like Galeria
Coppiola; and she cooked, like an angel—as she is.

None could serve up in such style the great
standard dishes of Roman cookery. The
wild boar of Troy, with honey, oil, flour and
garum; the Campanian sow, fed from golden
troughs, stuffed with chestnuts and spices,
and brought to table whole with her nine
little sucking pigs disposed around her in
sweet sauce; the vol au vents of peacocks'
tongues, and ortolans' eyes, and beccaficos'
brains. Yet, though great in these, she
excelled in fanciful, ravishing, gem-like dishes—
in what the French call "surprises"—in
culinary epigrams, edible enigmas, savoury
fables, poems that you could eat and drink.
She had sauces, the secrets of which have
gone to Paradise with her; she had feats of
legerdemain in compounding dishes that no
life-long apprenticeship could teach. And,
withal, she was so saving, so economical, so
cleanly in her arrangements, that her kitchen
was like a street in the clean village of Brock
(I should not like to pass half an hour even
in Velour's kitchen); and her noble master
had the satisfaction of knowing that he gave
the mightiest "spreads" in Genoa at
anything but an unreasonable or ruinous
expense.

She was as honest as a child's smile, and
was as regardless of kitchen stuff, perquisites,
Christmas boxes from tradesmen, and
the dangerous old crones who hung about
the area and cried hare-skins, as your own
cook, madam, I hope may be. And, above all,
little Zita had no followers, had boxed the
major-domo's ears for offering her a pair
of fillagree ear-rings, and was exceeding
pious.

Now, a pious cook is not considered, in
these sceptical days, as a very great desideratum.
A pious cook not unfrequently
refuses to cook a Sunday's dinner, and entertains
a serious grenadier on Sunday evening.
I have seen many a kitchen drawer in
which the presence of a hymn-book, and the
"Cook's Spiritual Comforter" (price nine-
pence per hundred for distribution) did not
exclude the company of much surreptitious