“An Alpine Christian!” cried Evadne.  “Oh, Aunt Marthe, that is beautiful!”

CHAPTER XIII.

“The ancient Egyptians, Evadne,” remarked Mr. Everidge the next day at dinner, as he selected the choicest portions of a fine roast duck for his own consumption, “during the period of their nation’s highest civilization, subsisted almost exclusively upon millet, dates and other fruits and cereals; and athletic Greece rose to her greatest culture upon two meals a day, consisting principally of maize and vegetables steeped in oil.  Don’t you think you ladies would find it of advantage to copy them in this laudable abstemiousness?  There is something repugnant to a refined taste in the idea of eating flesh whose constituent particles partake largely of the nature of our own.”

“Why, certainly, Uncle Horace,” said Evadne merrily.  “I am quite ready to become a vegetarian, if you will set me the example.  The feminine mind, you know, is popularly supposed to be only fitted to follow a masculine lead.”

“Ah, I wish it were possible, my dear Evadne, but the peculiar susceptibility of my internal organism precludes all thought of my making such a radical change in the matter of diet.  Even now, in spite of all my care, indigestion, like a grim Argus, stares me out of countenance.  I wish you would bear this fact more constantly in mind, my dear Marthe.  This duck, for instance, has not arrived at that stage of absolute fitness which is so essential to the appreciation of a delicate stomach.  A duck, Evadne, is a bird which requires very careful treatment in its preparation for the table.  It should be suspended in the air for a certain length of time, and then, after being carefully trussed, laid upon its breast in the pan, in order that all the juices of the body may concentrate in that titbit of the epicure,—­then let the knife touch its richly browned skin, and, presto, you have a dish fit for the gods!  The skin of this duck on the contrary presents a degree of resistance to the carver which proves that it has been placed in the oven before it had arrived at that stage of perfection.”

“Why, Horace,” laughed Mrs. Everidge, “I thought this one was just right!  You remember you told me the last one we had, had hung five hours too long.”

“Exactly so.  My friend, Trenton, will tell you that five hours is all the length of time required to seal the fate of nations.  It is a pet theory of his that the finale of the material world will be rapid.  He bases his conclusions upon the fact of the steady decrease in the volume of the surrounding atmosphere and the almost instantaneous action of all of Nature’s destructive forces, fire and flood, storm and sunstroke, lightning and hail, earthquake and cyclone.  Oh, apropos of my erudite friend, Marthe, he has promised to spend August with us, so you will have to look to your culinary laurels, for he is accustomed to dine at Delmonico’s.”