One of our French authors writes admiringly of "the chevaliers and abbes" of the last century, and their beneficent influence in advancing and disseminating the art of cookery. The chevaliers, it appears, were men of high social position; a sort of gentlemen soldiers, educated according to the culture of those days; having nothing particular to do but travel and see what they thought was the world; putting up themselves and their steeds at the monasteries when it happened that there was no inn that offered entertainment for man and beast; observing what the fattest of the fat friars ate and thrived upon and telling it at the next table for the edification of the new company; sampling and remembering the best dishes of the different countries and carrying the news in the times when books, papers and readers alike were few and dull. It could not be otherwise than that some maitres d' hotel (stewards of wealthy houses) should eagerly name some dish which had been so lucky as to be approved by one of these perhaps temporarily conspicuous personages, a la chevaliere, which is impliedly a la mode chevaliere; or - as we should write it - in the chevalier fashion; and it appears that there have been many dishes so named, but nearly all were evanescent, having no distin-guishment but some trifling accessory or whim of decoration of no permanent value. A comparison of several authorities shows that the only dishes which all agree in designating as a la chevaliere, are those that are egged and breadcrumbed. A chicken breaded and fried is a la chevaliere, a trout breaded and fried is a la chevaliere, too. The decorations vary, the breading is the one perma-nent feature. There is a refinement in this however, which requires grated cheese - Parmesan - to be mixed with the bre d curmbs used to coat the morsel. It may easily be imagined how some epicurean rover sitting down to breakfast with the sleek abbot found a surprise and a revelation in his first dish of capon bread-crumbed and fried in oil; how he labored to reproduce the dish when he returned come, and how it came to be called the chevalier's.

It should be observed that although the masculine chevalier does not terminate with e, a peculiarity of the French language requires a terminal e to be added and makes it feminine in the menu, as are all the words which follow "a la mode." Parisian style potatoes assume the feminine Parisienne; macaroni Italian style becomes Italienne, and so with all designations after "a la" except the proper names of persons,