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Customs of Different Countries

Breakfast is not so often made a meal of ceremony and invitation in America as in England; owing to the later hours which prevail in the latter country. On the Continent, especially in France and the southern countries of Europe, "breakfast" is a substantial meal of meat, wine, etc., taken at from eleven to twelve.

Do not therefore suppose the people are late risers; the custom is to take simply a cup of coffee and a bit of bread on rising, and to breakfast four or five hours afterwards. Many persons in the large cities, such as the brokers and others, often finish the usual day's work in this time.

Dinner, which differs in French households from breakfast more in having soup than in any other particular, is generally eaten at six, and is over in time to go to the theatre at eight. Parties begin in Paris at about midnight, or after the opera, and the doors of many of the large public balls open at that witching hour. Many who rise early, take a nap after the breakfast, and, in Spain, this is done by all classes; shops are closed and the streets deserted for a couple of hours for the "siesta " but then the Spaniard begins his work before day. دو In England, family breakfasts are generally of cold meats, and the dinner comes at eight in the evening, the ladies having a cup of tea in the afternoon, at about five o'clock.

In the cold countries of the North, especially among the Scandinavians, more meals are taken often as many as five, at which meat is served and these do not correspond to our meals or those of Southern Europeans, enough even to bear the same names.

Indeed, the hours for eating must be regulated by the hours of employment. If one is in the whirl of fashionable life of a great city, and nightly out until four or five o'clock in the morning, the heavy meal of the day must come late, and a light supper at midnight becomes a necessity. If you are a hard-working farmer, living in the country and going to bed between nine and ten, the meal hours must correspond. We often read of great changes in the dinner hour; that Henry the Eighth "dined" at ten in the morning. So he did. But until very modern times the heavy meal at close of day was called supper; they eat it in England to-day at nearly the same hour, and call it dinner. "What's in a name?"