Washed them in a large jar of cold water to free them from sand. Picked and heaped them in three glass bowls with individual pitchers of cold cream and bowls of powdered sugar at hand, and piles of glass sauce dishes. Cake of two or three varieties in the usual cake baskets on folded napkins.

It was not, then, a strictly cold supper after all, since the devilled crabs were fresh and warm, but what was of more consequence than that, the entire party expected, did not come. There was a moonlight excursion by steamboat that night and Miss Ophelia, and the two ladies and the two newspaper men went oft on the boat and only twelve remained; still, the inroads these made upon the eatables showed plainly that had all been there, there would only have been just provisions enough.

The Art of Charging Enough.

June 26. This morning I asked the proprietor of the Hotel D'Arlington:

"Have you any objection to telling me what you charged for last night's sup-per?"

"What would you have charged?" he returned, with the complacent smile of one who knows how.

While I was figuring on a dollar a plate and not knowing what was to be done about the odd number and the absentees, he added:

"I charged them twenty dollars for the supper and there was a profit on wine and cigars, and they were pleased and satisfied. If it had been a party of our town boys from the college I might have had to take seventy-five cents a plate, but these actors would have gone away thinking they had been treated in a second-class manner if I had charged them less - and I do not work for nothing."

"A very close friend of mine lost his chance of a fortune in the restaurant business some years ago through not knowing how to charge enough."

"It is a. very essential thing to know in our business.'

"Yes. He took a place and went on serving the best that was to be obtained in a superior style on a sort of ten-percent profit plan until all the one-horse eating houses around him closed, one after the other and he had all the trade."

"And then he raised his prices!"

"No."

"He was a fool."

"Yes. And went on doing more business and working harder and making less money, until - "

"He took sick?"

"No. But a man who knew how to charge five dollars for a two-and-a-half supper came along, bought him out easy, stepped in and made a few thousands without ever taking his gloves off, as it were."

"Now, that is not the way to look at the matter. The man who charged five dollars for a two-and-a-half supper did quite right and just what a portion of the public wanted him to do. They that paid it paid two-and-a-half for exclusive-ness. They paid a price that Tom, Dick and Harry could not pay, purposely that those three objectionable persons might be kept out; and, they paid it for better table-wear, finer furnishings and better service.

There is a vast amount of working for nothing in the ordinary boarding business. Great apparent profits would turn out to be dead loss in many cases if all the principals were paid as exactly as the hired helpers are. Summer boarding-house keepers will tend a garden four months in advance, turn the products into the boarding-house and count so much more made because they have no vegetables and fruits to buy when if they paid themselves for their gardening they would come out in debt.

Such might even be the case with such an apparently renumerative supper as that previously detailed, and this will explain why persons never become sudden-y rich by setting up to furnish parties to order, and why they cannot afford to be cheap in their charges, and why, more-over, hotel-keepers themselves seldom make any profit on any suppers or banquets that are beyond the easy capacity of their own establishment without outside help. If a little extra supper in a hotel requires the attendance until a late hour of three waiters, a pantryman or girl, and a dishwasher, the proprietor is not ordinarily expected to pay extra for such service, because, hiring by the month some accommodation is looked for from the help as an offset to the times of dull business when there is little to do, but the pay goes on all the same. But if these had to be specially hired for the occasion the cost would be one dollar each in most places, and half that amount in the very cheapest. A first-class cook in New York or Saratoga, if called in to prepare a private party can generally obtain ten dollars a day for his services. Ordinarly, a first-class caterer in any city, having such cooks in his employ charges for their services when they are sent out about $5 a day, and about such a rate the hotel-keeper would have to pay if he had not his own cook to command. Add then the cost of gas, of fires, the hire of dishes and tableware, hire of express wagon and a hand to go to and tro, pack and unpack, the washing of napkins and table cloths and other like incidentals and the anticipated profits from even the finest ball supper may delusively vanish before you know how it all happened - unless you rush in slowly and know how to charge enough.