when I did not want them, and I have none when I am in need of them! God is most clement! Allah karim !"

With these words, Zadig concluded his story: Mourad had been napping during a great portion of it; and when he heard the last sentence, he gave thanks to the apostle for endowing his breast with patience; and returned to his wife's abode.

CHAPTER XVI.

I have not presumed to recommend one receipt, that I have not previously and repeatedly proved in my own kitchen.

The Cook's Oracle.

It was some days since Mourad had been at Miriam's. He had numberless occupations to plead for his absence; but none were likely to be received on the festival of her patron saint; a day which is generally devoted by an Armenian woman to every sort of fantasia, but more especially to the enjoyment of eating and drinking!

Armenian ladies are very generally of Doctor Johnson's opinion, that one who does not mind the stomach, will hardly mind any thing else. No women are fonder of the enjoyments of the table than they are. An Armenian soiree is

little more than an academy of gastronomes, where neither the merits of novels nor millinery are discussed; but where the excellence of a kid stuffed with chesnuts, a wild boar seasoned with mint and honey, and such other delicate dishes, form the interesting topic of conversation.

Grisnod de la Reyniere, who gave the world the multifarious almanack des Gormands, or the great Gonthier, who, in less than ten years, invented seven culisses, nine ragouts, thirty-one sauces, and twenty-one soups, cannot for a moment stand a comparison with a Levantine artiste in the multiplicity of her dishes. Every lady is duly instructed in the culinary department at an early age. La science de la gueule is her first study; but it is only when she becomes a matron, that the theory of the art is reduced to practice, and that the magnificent scale of her beauty becomes the envy of all the Turkish women in her neighbourhood.

The beauty of an Armenian lady is of a most terrestrial character, solid, substantial beauty, sicklied o'er by no pale cast of thought, nor spoiled by any air of sen timent, nor rendered

too puerile by any sportive sun-beam of romance—nothing of the sort. There are neither sylphs nor seraphs amongst them; they are all full grown cherubs, like the Cavalier Bernini's at the entrance to Saint Peter's—emblems of mortality, chubby and inanimate.

Miriam's tutelary saint was the mother of St. George. Whether the avocation of the son of her patroness had any thing to do with her choice, is not quite certain; but it is probable enough, that the saint having been a butcher in his youth, the same circumstance which made him the patron of a land of beef-steaks, caused his mother to be revered in a country of kibabs.

It was on the festival of the latter, that Miriam put all her stew-pans in requisition, and superintended the cooking of a dinner which would have done honour to any artiste, from the days of Patroclus, who dressed his own olla potrida, to those of Catherine di Medici, who, history informs us, "recovered sauces from oblivion which had been lost for ages."

Mourad and his fair lady sat down to a din

ner, which might have served in France for a table of fifty covers. But the quantity of onion and garlic which prevailed in the viands, would have sufficed Beauvilliers for ten repasts. Miriam was not at all of the opinion that the dispensation of garlic in the hands of the cook is a matter of the nicest judgment; that garlic in the hands of a cook is like Prussic acid in the hands of a doctor, and becomes a poison or a panacea, according to the skill with which it is administered. On the contrary, she thought too much garlic could not be employed; and as she loved its flavour, she had no idea of another person having an objection to its Excess.

Mourad, at the commencement of the dinner, was silent and sombre. He not only thought it beneath the dignity of a man to sit at the same table with a woman, but considered the refinement of Levantine cookery "did rather mar than make good meat."

But it is impossible for any length of time to withstand the enlivening influence of a rich repast; to see dish after dish set down and removed with delightful rapidity, without feel