have especially devoted themselves to this form of the art, and in New York and Boston furnish one with a very fair dinner indeed, including a flask of drinkable Chianti, for four or five shillings.  At some of the simple German restaurants one gets excellent German fare and beer, but these are seldom available for ladies.  The fair sex, however, takes care to be provided with more elegant establishments for its own use, to which it sometimes admits its husbands and brothers.  The sign of a large restaurant in New York reads:  “Women’s Cooeperative Restaurant; tables reserved for gentlemen,” in which I knew not whether more to admire the uncompromising antithesis between the plain word “women” and the complimentary term “gentlemen” or the considerateness that supplies separate accommodation for the shrinking creatures denoted by the latter.  Perhaps this is as good a place as any to note that it is usually as unwise to patronise a restaurant which professedly caters for “gents” as to buy one’s leg-coverings of a tailor who knows them only as “pants.”  Probably the “adult gents’ bible-class,” which Professor Freeman encountered, was equally unsatisfactory.

Soup, poultry, game, and sweet dishes are generally as good as and often better than in English restaurants.  Beef and mutton, on the other hand, are frequently inferior, though the American porterhouse and other steaks sometimes recall English glories that seem largely to have vanished.  The list of American fish is by no means identical with that of Europe, and some of the varieties (such as salmon) seem scarcely as savoury.  The stranger, however, will find some of his new fishy acquaintances decided acquisitions, and it takes no long time to acquire a very decided liking for the bass, the pompano, and the bluefish, while even the shad is discounted only by his innumerable bones.  The praises of the American oyster should be sung by an abler and more poetic pen than mine!  He may not possess the full oceanic flavour (coppery, the Americans call it) of our best “natives,” but he is large, and juicy, and cool, and succulent, and fresh, and (above all) cheap and abundant.  The variety of ways in which he is served is a striking index of the fertile ingenuity of the American mind; and the man who knows the oyster only on the half-shell or en escalope is a mere culinary suckling compared with him who has been brought face to face with the bivalve in stews, plain roasts, fancy roasts, fries, broils, and fricassees, to say nothing of the form “pigs in blankets,” or as parboiled in its own liquor, creamed, sauted, or pickled.