It is a mistake to invite a larger number than one's dinner-table can accommodate comfortably. Care must be taken also to have the room at the right temperature, and so to place the table as to avoid draughts as much as possible. A dinner guichet is an excellent means of doing so, and in some houses can be easily contrived in the wall. It may be a lift for carrying up full dishes and taking down empty ones to the kitchen, or it may serve as a shelf for handing them through from a serving-room on the same floor as the dining-room. This convenient arrangement prevents the necessity of opening the door and thus creating a draught.

The menu will have been carefully arranged by the hostess, whether the food is cooked at home or supplied by a caterer. Sometimes a medium course is followed, a certain number of the dishes being sent in, the rest prepared in the host's own kitchen.

wines

The wine should be the care of the master of the house. The butler, when there is one, is occasionally trusted with this important task, and if he be experienced he will see that the champagne is properly iced, the claret duly warmed, the hock cooled, and the port carefully decanted.

In the absence of an experienced butler and of sufficient energy on the part of the host to see to these things, a few hints may be acceptable on the judicious cooling and warming of wines, so very often mismanaged.

The temperature of the wine-cellar should be kept at 6o° Fahr. Port, claret, and Burgundy should be decanted in the cellar, and in winter taken into the warm dining-room and, with stoppers removed, placed on the chimneypiece for about an hour. This is unnecessary in warm weather, as then the temperature of the dining-room restores the wine to 6o° Fahr., if it should have lost any heat during its transit from the cellar.

Champagne and Moselle are usually served in their original bottles. These should be embedded in crushed ice up to the neck for half an hour before dinner, every particle of wire having been first removed. This should reduce the temperature to 400, or even 35°, but anything less than the latter is too low. Americans like it, but English taste finds that over-icing spoils the flavour, and is also disagreeable to the teeth.

Sometimes when the dining-room is hot, and when a bottle of champagne has been taken out of the ice and not emptied in its round of the table in the servant's hand, the wine in it acquires too high a tempera- ture. This can be avoided by wrapping it in a cloth wrung out of salted water. Round it is folded the usual white napkin in which it is carried round.