that our impressions of things depend less on their intrinsic worth
than on such or such extrinsic circumstance which may affect our mental
vision at the moment. I suppose mine was affected by the mist and rain
which graced the capital of Piedmont on the morning of my arrival there.
Another incident, microscopic, and almost too ludicrous to mention,
had no less its weight in the scale of prepossession. I was tired and
hungry, and, while the _diligence_ was being unloaded, I entered a
_caffé_ close by, and called for some buttered toast. My hair (I had
plenty at that time) stood on end at the answer I received. There was no
buttered toast to be had, the waiter said. "It was not the custom." I
confess I augured ill of a city from whose _caffés_, unlike all others
throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished.

I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly
plead guilty. My mother--bless her soul!--brought me up in the faith of
buttered toast. I had breakfasted upon it all my life. I could conceive
of no breakfast without it. Hence the shock I felt. "Not the custom!"
Why not, I wondered. A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you! It
has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years. If I had a
thousand dollars,--a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the
pen,--I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best
memoir on this question:--"Why is buttered toast excluded from the
_caffés_ of Turin?" It is not from lack of proper materials,--for heaps
of butter and mountains of rolls are to be seen on every side; it is not
from lack of taste,--for the people which has invented the _grisini_,
and delights in the white truffle, shows too keen a sense of what is
dainty not to exclude the charge of want of taste.

"Pray, what are the _grisini?_ what is the white truffle?" asks the
inquisitive reader.--The _grisini_ are bread idealized, bread under the