despatched by the stage waggon from the Hampshire or Surrey coasts? It is impossible to over-estimate the boon conferred on gastronomy by rapid railway transit and the parcel post. Can there be a more agreeable surprise when you come down to breakfast than the card box on the table, with a brace or leash of plump woodcock, marked with the date of their demise, only four and twenty hours before? Now that London is in swift connection with the glens of Kerry or the lochs of Western Ross, the woodcock comes to us nearly in perfection and he is beginning to be estimated as he ought to be, though it is true that you can only have the trail at the very best when he is eaten, like the crimped and curdled salmon, within a few hours of his sudden euthanasia. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, that illustrious gourmet Lord Alvanley carried off the prize at White's for the most delicate and costly dish that could be devised. There were cocks' combs and the oysters of pheasants, fillets of the snipe, and many other good things, but the trail and the brain of the woodcock are conspicuous by their absence. For the brain has a marvellously sublimated essence of its own, and we marvel that when Apicius or Lucullus was using the brains of peacocks and nightingales by the hundred in a single plat he overlooked the

woodcock, which has always been more common on the Alban Hills and in the Campagna than the melodious Philomel.

6

Even now the bird is comparatively neglected with us, though it always commands fair prices in the markets. There is a season when we are absolutely sickened with quails: they figure as rôts or in other forms at every dinner party, as the turbot and turkeys which Thackeray abused when familiarity had bred disgust. Why not vary the menu with more of the woodcocks, simply roasted on a substratum of truffled toast? Simply roasted,' I say, for, whether from ignorance, indifference, or on principle, the English treatment of the woodcock has at least the inestimable merit of simplicity. Of all birds, like his congeners the plover and the snipe, you can do no better than leave him to himself. For the grand object with all game is to cherish the natural aroma, and that of the woodcock is incomparable and unimprovable. There are fragrant essences, such as that of the truffle, which may be blended advantageously-indeed, the wedding of the truffle and the woodcock is a veritable love-match-but they must be severely subdued. Brillat-Savarin, a born connoisseur, and consequently an exception to his countrymen of the florid school of cuisine, thoroughly understood that. Prefacing

with the obvious remark that the woodcock is a bird très distingué, he goes on to say that it is never in all its glory save when roasted under the eyes of the sportsman, especially of the sportsman who has killed it then the roast is accomplished according to rule, and the mouth "s'inonde des délices." There, possibly, the sentimental submerges the practical, for the chasseur may be a dead shot and an earnest gastronomer without the faintest knowledge of the delicate art of roasting. But it is certain that I have never appreciated roast woodcock more than in a Highland shooting box, where, from the close vicinity of kitchen to dining room, you always knew exactly what was dressing for dinner. The woodcock should be served glowing hot, and rushed from the spit to the table. How can he have justice done him in a club palace in Pall Mall with scores of dishes being sent up in a scramble, or in a grande maison, where the culinary laboratories are a sabbath day's journey from the banqueting-hall, and where the maître-trancheur does his listless carving at a sideboard?

Strange to say, the woodcock figures as little in French literature as in English. Dumas, who was a keen sportsman and bred in the broad forests of VillersCotterets, who prided himself on his gifts of cookery and spent hours over his kitchen fires in his fantastic

château of Monte Cristo, as the Regent Orleans relaxed from cares of State in his chemical experiments, makes no allusion to the bird, although in his 'Impressions de Voyage' he makes frequent mention of the snipe, and alludes to the special gastronomical delicacies of every country he visited. His Meneur de Loups,' poaching the woodlands with his infernal pack, gathering up various sorts of feathered game, from pheasants to râles de genêt, never includes either bécasse or bécassine in his game-gifts to his gossip Magloire. George Sand, in her sympathetic descriptions of the game of the Sologne, speaks of pheasants and redlegs and water-fowl, but never of woodcocks and seldom of snipes. What is even more remarkable, the socialist sybarite Eugène Sue, in decking the stall of Leonard the braconnier in the orangerie of his uncle Dr. Gasterini, omits the woodcock among the festoons of feathered trophies which hung over the hures de sanglier and the haunches of venison. Yet I suppose that in his time, as at the present day, he might have seen the 'cocks with their mottled plumage, most beautiful in death, among the chief ornaments of the richly tinted display in the windows of Chevet or Potier. In fact, the woodcock has happily inspired the Viennese and Bavarian woodcarvers, who have rivalled, in their decorations of dining salons, the most exquisite work of

Grinling Gibbons. In Viennese hotels and fashionable restaurants I have been struck with the appropriateness of the sculptured effigies adorning the buffets and side-tables, when the rôti or salmi was being served with the Voslauer, Erlauer, or Champagne.

For the woodcock, as I said, is scattered all over Europe, and there are countries he favours far more than our own islands. The coverts around Rome are haunts of his predilection. In the markets of the Piazza Navona, or on stalls under the shadows of the Pantheon, you may see the birds hanging of a morning by the score. They always figured among the rôtis at a Roman dinner at the Minerva. Not a few are knocked over at the great battues in the woods of Bohemia and Lower Austria, and there are no finer birds than those that used to be sold for a trifle in Vienna. I have golden dreams of suppers after the opera or theatres at the Archduke Charles and the Golden Lamb in the Leopoldstadt. I remember more simple repasts at the Kaiserin Elisabeth at Ischl, when woodcocks, preluded by venison cutlets, followed trout of your own catching from the Traun. For the hotel-keeper there consented to cook the contents of your own basket, and did not insist on scooping the fish out of his reservoirs. But my associations with 'cocks in super