The use of the table-napkin not being thoroughly understood in some remote parts of the earth, only recently opened to the march of civilization, it may be well to state that the napkin should not be used for mopping a perspiring brow, or wiping your nose, or indeed for wiping anything but your mouth and fingers. When you sit down to table you ought to find your napkin neatly folded and placed on your plate with a fair piece of bread or a roll inside it. The most worthy person at table having set the example, you place the bread to the right of your plate, unfold your napkin entirely and lay it over your knees loosely. You may have heard travellers scoff at the practical Frenchman who stuffs one corner of his napkin inside his shirt-collar and spreads it fully over the front of his person from his chin down to his knees. This is the practice of the French people of the middle and lower classes, who are thrifty and prudent, and who wish to eat at their ease and not to spot their clothes. There is nothing ridiculous in this practice. There is a reason, and an excellent reason, for so spreading the napkin, and if I were dining at home, or alone at a restaurant or club, and had on my spotless shirt and open waistcoat and claw-hammer coat, all ready to go to the opera, I should certainly spread my napkin over my manly and snowy bosom, just as the Frenchman does, and so I should dine at my ease, serenely and without care, knowing that I had thus insured the immaculateness of my linen. However, let it be remembered that company manners, in all countries, require you simply to spread your napkin loosely over your knees and to eat cleanly and decently.

With the dessert-plate, and on it, appears the mouth-bowl or the finger-bowl. That excellent lady, Madame la Comtesse de Gen-lis, who was governess to the children of the Due d'Orleans, one of whom became King Louis Philippe of France, wrote in her "Dic-tionnaire Critique et Raisonne des Etiquettes de la Cour," published in 1818: "Formerly women, after dinner or supper, rose and left the table to rinse out their mouths ; the men, and even the princes of royal blood, out of respect for the women, did not allow themselves to remain in the dining-room to do the same thing; they passed into an anteroom. Nowadays this species of toilet is performed at table in many houses, where you see Frenchmen sitting next to women wash their hands and spit in a bowl. This spectacle is a very astonishing one for their grandfathers and grandmothers." The good Madame de Genlis adds that this usage comes from England, and that the custom is, certainly, not French. The noble dame also subjoins an indignant note to the effect that Plutarch styled the dinner-table as the "altar of the gods of friendship and of hospitality."

Certainly the operation of using a mouth-bowl is far from pleasing to contemplate, but it is very convenient; it conduces to comfort, and, provided it be generally practised, nobody thinks anything about it. The material side of eating cannot be other than disagreeable if looked at from an absolute point of view, instead of from the point of view of usage and convenience. Food and the act of eating, masticating, and swallowing are in themselves disgusting phenomena. That horribly snobbish and conceited Lord Byron - I mean the famous poet - used to profess that the spectacle of a pretty woman eating filled him with horror; and, after all, a civilized man devouring, with all possible good-breeding, a slice of roast beef, is as disagreeable a sight as a crow tearing and devouring a piece of carrion. But eating being a necessity, nature and civilization have taken care to surround the operation with everything that tends to distract the attention from the material side; and they have suc-13 ceeded so completely that not one man out of a thousand knows anything about the physiology of eating or the chemistry of food. Eating has become a social as well as a natural act; it has been sublimated by the idea of hospitality; the festive board has acquired a certain solemnity from its connection with the great festivals of the family ; and dinner has become the highest function of home life, a daily act to which no other can be compared in importance and results.

To return to the mouth-bowl, when once its convenience has been recognized it cannot be regarded as any more objectionable than a toothpick, and it must be made use of in the same spirit, simply, without ostentation, and without false shame. The most appropriate bowls are made of white, dark blue, or opal glass, about three inches deep and four and one half in diameter, either round or square, and in each bowl is served a little goblet to match, containing tepid water perfumed with mint or orange flower just sufficiently to take away the disagreeable insipidity of warm water. If you wish to perform the complete operation, you take a little water into your mouth and roll it about without making strange noises or still stranger grimaces, but discreetly and in a manner such as to rinse your teeth and gums; mean-while you have emptied the rest of the water out of the goblet into the bowl, where you dip your finger-tips; then, having sufficiently washed your fingers, you raise the bowl to your mouth, spit the water out of your mouth into it, replace the empty goblet in the bowl, and the waiter removes the object, while you wipe your mouth and your fingers on your napkin, the whole business being the affair of half a minute. Of course, if you are at a table where the mouth-rinsing is not generally practised, you will abstain; but let us hope that it will not be your misfortune to dine at a table where finger-bowls are not known. If such is your unhappy lot, you are quite justified in filling up a glass of water, dipping your finger-tips in it, and even moistening your napkin in order the better to wipe your lips clean before leaving the table. These small operations, trivial as they may seem, are necessary for comfort and for cleanliness; and cleanliness, it has been said, is next to godliness.