ves fortunate in not being thrown
after them."

Is there a cooking theme in _Siegfried_ to describe Mime's brewing?
Lavignac and others, who have listed the _Ring motive_, have neglected
to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole
act is taken up in _Louise_ with the preparation for and consumption
of a dinner. Scarpia eats in _Tosca_ and the heroine kills him with a
table knife. There is much talk of food in _Hansel und Gretel_ and
there is a supper in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. There are drinking
songs in _Don Giovanni_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Hamlet_, _La Traviata_,
_Girofle-Girofla_.... The reference to whiskey and soda in _Madama
Butterfly_ is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical
Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of _Don
Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of
champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he
held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own
middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year
round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their
largely frequented _tables-d'hote_." Eating or drinking on the stage
is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered
during Papageno's supper scene in _The Magic Flute_: "The supper which
Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard
imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small
draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the
dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting
the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I
felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the
wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something
was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table.
Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the
caution I received, and was informed that as each night the
carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine
before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of
the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled
castor-oil with my drink!"

A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that
his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a
remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I
reassured him