form of walking-sticks a third of a little finger in diameter, and from
which every the least particle of crumb has been carefully eliminated.
It is light, easy of digestion, cracks without effort under your teeth,
and melts in your mouth. It is savory eaten alone, excellent with your
viands, capital sopped in wine. A good Turinese would rather have no
dinner at all than sit down to one without a good-sized bundle of these
torrified reeds on his right or left. Beware of the spurious imitations
of this inimitable mixture of flour, which you will light on in some
_passages_ in Paris! They possess nothing of the _grisini_ but the name.

"I have it!" I fancy I hear some imaginative reader exclaim at this
place. "The passion for the _grisini_ accounts most naturally for the
want of buttered toast in Turin. Don't you see that it is replaced by
the _grisini?_"

A mistake, a profound mistake. _Grisini_ are _never_ served with your
coffee or chocolate. Try again.

The white truffle,--white, mark you, and not to be confounded with its
black, hard, knotty, poor cousin of Périgord,--well, the white truffle
is--the white truffle. There are things which admit of no definition. It
would only spoil them. Define the Sun, if you dare. "Look at it," would
be your answer to the indiscreet questioner. And so I say to you,--Taste
it, the white truffle. Not that you will relish it, on a first or second
trial. No. It requires a sort of initiation. Ambrosia, depend upon it,
would prove unpalatable, at first, to organs degraded by coarse mortal
food. It has,--the white truffle, I mean, not the ambrosia, which I have
never tasted,--it has a shadow of a shade of mitigated garlic flavor,
which demands time and a certain training of the gustatory apparatus, to
be fully appreciated. Try again, and it will grow upon you,--again