or of a
projected ball. We are less learned in point lace than we are in
croquettes. There may be a flaw in our diamonds, but our butter is
peerless. Our balls have their culminating point in the supper, and not
in the German. We invite our best friends more willingly to partake of a
new dish than to meet some distinguished stranger. And at most of our
grand entertainments two great rushes take place--the one toward the
dining-room when supper is announced, and the other out of the front
door when the banquet is ended, when repleted Nature finds no more joy
at the thought of terrapin, and when champagne has become a delusion and
a snare.

In far different style do people entertain on the other side of the
water. In Paris, that very paradise of cookery, the substantial element
of balls and parties is either wholly wanting or is but a very secondary
consideration. A Parisienne will bid you to her house, and leave you to
refresh exhausted Nature with a cup of tea and a sponge-cake. In summer
she may vary the entertainment by offering you a glass of currant syrup
and water. She would consider herself as utterly ruined in a financial
point of view did she conceive that an assemblage of some twenty or
thirty people would require anything more substantial. At entertainments
on a larger scale, such as _soirees musicales_, evening receptions,
etc., ices, coffee, sandwiches and a variety of small cakes are usually
handed round during the course of the evening; and that is all. At the
grandest of grand balls the supper is almost invariably composed
entirely of cold dishes--chicken, filet of beef, fish with mayonnaise
sauce, etc., with ices, cakes and delicious bon-bons. If extra
magnificence in the matter of viands is aimed at, it is sought in the
matter of unseasonable and consequently costly delicacies. Thus, at a
ball which was given during the month of February last the feature of
the supper was strawberries served in unlimited profusion. The
substantiality, the abundance, the variety of one of our Philadelphia
suppers, with its terrapin, its croquettes, its oysters dressed in half
a dozen styles, its game and sweetbreads and chicken salad, its ices and
Charlotte Russe and meringues, its fruits and flowers, its oceans of
champagne, rivers of hock and lakes of claret punch, would make a
Parisian open his eyes--ay, and his mouth as well. For, be it known, the
foreigners who scorn suppers in their native land lay aside all such