ven better. Those which they
cook in an especially worthy manner are potatoes and cabbages, and
their way of making omelets is admirable. I do not speak of game,
fish, milk-foods, and butter, because their praises need not be
repeated, and I am silent for fear of being too enthusiastic about
that celebrated cheese into which, when once one has plunged one's
knife, one continues with a sort of increasing fury, thrusting and
gashing and abandoning one's self to every style of slashing and
gouging until the rind is empty, and desire still hovers over the
ruins.

A stranger who dines for the first time in a Dutch restaurant sees a
number of strange things. In the first place, the plates are very
large and heavy, in proportion to the national appetite; in many
places the napkins are of very thin white paper, folded at three
corners, and ornamented with a printed border of flowers, with a
little landscape in the corner, and the name of the restaurant, or
_Bon appetit_, printed on them in large blue letters. The stranger, to
be sure of having something he can eat, orders roast beef, and they
bring him half a dozen great slices as large as a cabbage leaf; or a
steak, and they bring him a lump of very rare meat which would suffice
for a family; or fish, and they set before him an animal as long as
the table; and each of these dishes is accompanied by a mountain of
mashed potatoes and a pot of strong mustard. They give him a slice of
bread a little larger than a dollar and as thin as a wafer. This is
not pleasant for us Italians, who eat bread like beggars, so that in a
Dutch restaurant, to the great surprise of the waiters, we are obliged
to ask for more bread every moment. On any one of these three dishes
and a glass of Bavarian or Amsterdam beer a man may venture to say he
has dined. Any one who has a lean pocket-book need not dream of wine
in Holland, for it is frightfully dear; but, as the people's purses
there are generally well filled, nearly all the Dutch, from the middle
class up, drink wine, and there are few other countries where there is
so great an abundance and variety of foreign wines, particularly of
those from French and Rhenish vineyards.

Those who like liqueurs after dinner are well served in Holland. There
is no need to mention that the Dutch liqueurs are famous the world
over. The most famous of them all is "Schiedam," an extract of
juniper-berries that takes its name from the little town of Schiedam,
onl