A table-knife is to be used to cut food, and never to convey food to the mouth, which is the function of forks and spoons. Nevertheless, you constantly see people eating cheese with a knife. The treatise on "Civility Puerile et Honnete," used in the ancient and well-mannered school where I was brought up, expressly forbade this usage. Dry cheese, I was taught, should be cut into small pieces on your plate as need requires, and each piece taken up delicately with the fingers and so conveyed to the mouth; soft cheese should be spread with the knife on each mouthful of bread; frothy cheese, like cream-cheese, should be eaten with a spoon.

The Anglo-Saxons are afraid to use their fingers to eat with, especially the English. Thanks to this hesitation, I have seen, in the course of my travels in the Old World, many distressing sights. I have seen ladies attempt to eat a craw-fish {ecrevisse) with a knife and fork and abandon the attempt in despair. I have also seen men in the same fix. I have seen - oh, barbarous and cruel spectacle! - Anglo-Saxons, otherwise apparently civilized, cut off the points of asparagus and, with a fork, eat only these points, thus leaving the best part of the vegetable on their plates. As for artichokes, they generally utterly defeat the attacks of those who trust simply to the knife and fork.

Fingers must be used for eating certain things, notably asparagus, artichokes, fruit, olives, radishes, pastry, and even small fried fish; in short, everything which will not dirty or grease the fingers may be eaten with the fingers. For my own part I prefer to eat lettuce salad with my fingers rather than with a fork, and Queen Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the eighteenth century were of my way of thinking. If the ladies could only see how pretty is their gesture when their diaphanous forefinger and thumb grasp a leaf of delicate green lettuce and raise that leaf from the porcelain plate to their rosy lips, they would all immediately take to eating salad a la Marie Antoinette. Only bear in mind, good ladies, that if you do wish to eat lettuce salad with your fingers you must mix the salad with oil and vinegar, and not with that abominable, ready-made white "salad-dressing," to look upon which is nauseating.

May Heaven preserve us from excessive Anglomania in matters of table-service and eating! The English tend to complicate the eating-tools far too much. They have too many forks for comfort, and the forms of them are too quaint for practical utility. Certainly, silver dessert knives and forks are very good in their way, because they are not susceptible to the action of fruit acids, but it is vain and clumsy to attempt to make too-exclusive use of the knife and fork in eating fruit. Don't imitate, for instance, certain ultra - correct English damsels who eat cherries with a fork and swallow the stones because they are too modest, or, rather, too asinine, to spit them out on to the plate. Eating is not a thing to be ashamed of. To thoroughly enjoy a peach you must bite it and feel the juicy, perfumed flesh melt in your mouth. But, let the Anglomaniacs say what they please, there is no necessity of sticking a fork into the peach and peeling it while so impaled, as if it were an ill-favored and foul object. A peach is as beautiful to the touch as it is to the eye; a peach held between human fingers has its beauty enhanced by the beauty of the fingers. However dainty and ornate the silver dessert-knife and fork may be, it always irritates me to see people cut up their peaches, or pears, or apricots, or what not, into cubes and parallelopipeds, as if dessert were a branch of conic sections. Imitate Marie Antoinette, ladies: use your fingers more freely; eat decently, of course, but do not be the slaves of silly Anglomania or Newport crazes. To eat a pear or an apple conveniently cut it into quarters, and peel each quarter in turn as you eat it. The peach, too, can be cut into quarters if the eater is timid. Apricots do not need peeling, nor plums either. Who would be bold enough to peel a fresh fig, or even to touch such a delicate fruit with even the purest silver instruments ?

I have referred to the disastrous discomfiture of English men and women by a dish of crawfish. This dish, not being of common occurrence in America or England, might be neglected by an unthoughtful writer, but as fifty thousand Americans visit Europe every year, and as I could wish them all, when in France or Belgium, to taste this meat, I will add a note on the way of tackling it. The three chief forms in which you will find the crawfish served in Europe are as a coulis in potage bisque, generally, alas! much adulterated with carrots and rice flour; boiled in a court-bouillon and served as ecre-visses en buisson; cooked in a rich and highly spiced sauce which produces ecrevisses a la Bordelaise. In all these forms the crawfish, which, as you know, of course, is a sort of miniature fresh-water lobster, is excellent. The soup you eat, naturally, with a spoon. Of the ecrevisses en buisson you help yourself, with your fingers, to a bunch of half a dozen ; take them one by one; pull off and crack and suck the claws; break the shell with your teeth or with nut-crackers, and extract the dainty flesh of the tail. After this dish it is necessary to pass round finger-bowls and to change the napkins. Ecrevisses a la Borde-laise must be eaten in the same manner; finger-bowls and clean napkins, if not a complete bath, are necessary after the consumption of a good dish of this succulent crustacean.

It being desirable that people's table-manners should be equal to any emergency, whether they are in their own country or engaged in foreign travel, I will add that the use of salt-spoons is not universal in this world. If you happen to be at a table where the host, recalcitrant to progress, has not invested any capital in vermeil, silver, or bone salt-spoons, help yourself to salt with the point of your knife, as Erasmus of Rotterdam tells you, having previously wiped it on your plate or on a bit of bread. Do not attempt to help yourself to salt with the handle of your fork or spoon. In countries where salt-spoons are not held in honor, such an attempt would be esteemed a mark of ill-breeding.