Little dinners, pretty and enjoyable, are, to my mind, the only rational way of entertaining. If people in ordinary circumstances are to make them a success, they must try no elaborate dishes, no long dinners which it is necessary to get some one in to cook; for this is always evident, and makes dinner-giving both a burden and an expense. If little dinners are to be successful, they must bring neither, otherwise they lapse into long dinners, too often stupid, with the hostess too wearied to be bright, after a day spent in a hot kitchen, helping her incompetent cook to struggle with unaccustomed, and hence difficult, dishes. As one course after another comes on, their success is her chief anxiety, rather than the entertainment of her guests. Inexpressibly better a simple joint, with roast potatoes, and a fresh, bright hostess, whose only thought is the intellectual entertainment of her guests.

The elaborate and conventional dinner, complete at all points, which the dinner-giving of a century and a half has evolved, is beyond any but the very wealthy. Very few of them succeed in giving it, and still fewer of their guests enjoy it. Its triple triplets of oysters, soup, and fish, the releve, entrees, and roast, a pause of rum punch to stimulate languishing digestion, game with salad, sweets and ice, coffee to close, and a bewildering series of wines, with an alcoholic appetizer to begin and end, have, however, had their effect in making many feel that a formal dinner must only follow this model from afar. So, with only the resources of a simple household, they compass, with infinite labor, oysters, soup, and fish, add some made dish to the meat, and put salad before and ice cream after the pudding or sweets. But success here, with a moderate income, is as rare as success with the long dinner at the complete table. Try to grasp the theory of the elaborate edifice which custom and convention has piled up, and see if your own resources cannot reproduce its purpose with better success. After having carefully analyzed it, you will see at once that the most complex dinner simply aims to begin with something of easy digestion, slide by some transition to the roast, and make sure that through salad, sweets and coffee, the last half of your dinner shall interest the appetite as well as satisfy hunger. You, have, therefore, soup, roast, dessert, which make up the usual dinner of thoroughly civilized people, and below you will see how, with but moderate resources, you may so vary this as to make a "little dinner" complete and satisfying in itself; more, the most elaborate meal at Delmonico's cannot do.

To begin with, don't have too many people. It is as bad as too many courses. Until years of experience have taught you how to conduct and carry on the conversation and social contact of eight or ten, six at the utmost are enough for a successful dinner. Get together around an evening dinner table, six of the pleasantest people whom you know (including yourself), put at defiance most of the traditions for a dinner party, and success will be quite sure to be the result. I say "night," because there is an indescribable something about the meal, together with the hour and the lights and all, that seems to make people talk as they never talk at a noon dinner or at a tea.

Have only what your cook can do easily, and, above all things, never try anything that you have not had sufficiently often when you are by yourselves to be quite sure she can do it well. If you are too far from the sea for oysters on the shell to be quite perfect, or even if you are not, begin with soup. Follow this, perhaps, with cream macaroni. It is more easily prepared than fish in any form, and almost every one likes it. This should be succeeded by the usual roast, or something of the sort, with which serve one vegetable only, beside rice or potatoes. Then, of course, comes a salad, and after that some sweet as a dessert. East India preserved ginger is one of the nicest things possible, and not at all expensive, as a jar costing $1.50 will make several desserts. Serve with it some wafers or delicate, thin water-crackers, and be sure to serve it from the jar in which it comes, standing the jar on some pretty plate. Lastly, comes black coffee.

S. W. R. WILLIAMS.