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 _caffes_, 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
_caffes_ 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.
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