n "hole out the last hole in four" beneath
the eyes of the ladies. Striding victorious into the hospitable club,
where beer awaits him, he need not envy the pheasant-slayer who has slain
his hundreds.

ART OF DINING.

There is such a thing as nationality in dining, just as Mr. Browning has
proved, in a brilliant poem, that there is nationality in drinks.
Surveying mankind with extensive view, the essayist recognizes that the
science is not absolutely ignored in Turkey, where we cannot but think
that an archaic school retains too much wool with the mutton, and that
dining (like Egyptian Art) is rather a matter of sacred and immemorial
rules than in any worthy sense of the word a science. The Chinese and
Japanese have long been famous for their birds'-nest soup, and for making
the best, after his lamented decease, of the friend of man--the dog.
About the Australians and New Zealanders, perhaps the less said the
better. Many students will feel that our own colonists have neglected to
set a proper example to these poor heathen races, who, save kangaroos,
have no larger game than rats. The Englishman in Australia revels in
boundless mutton, in damper, in tea, and in the vintages of his adopted
soil, which he playfully, and patriotically, compares to those of the
Rhine. It is impossible, on the other hand, not to recognize the merits
of the Russian _cuisine_, where the imported civilization of France has
found various good traditional ideas still retained by the Sclavonic
people; and where the _caviare_, "with that pale green hue which denotes
the absence of salt," is not to be overlooked. In melancholy contrast to
the native genius of the Sclavs is the absolute dearth of taste and sense
in gastronomic Germany. If a map of the world could be made--and why
not?--in which lands of utter darkness in culinary matters should be
coloured black (like heathen countries in the missionary atlas, and
coalfields in the map of physical geography), the German Empire would be
one vast blot on Central Europe. Science might track Teutonic blood by
the absence of respectable cookery; and in England too obvious tokens
would be found of that incapacity of the art of dining which we brought
from the marshes of Holstein. In America, nature herself has put the
colonists on many schemes for the improvement of dinner, and terrapin
soup is gratefully associated with memoirs of Virginia--in the minds of
those who like terrapin soup. Th