after looking over the pages of the book with the greatest care, and after looking also on the back of them, I do not find my recipes included in it. The obvious conclusion is that while this book was in the press my recipes were stolen out of it.

The various dishes that I had selected were of so distinctive a character and the art involved in their preparation so entirely recherché that it seems a pity that they should be altogether lost. They contained a certain je ne sais quoi which would have marked them out as emphatically the perquisite of the few. To say that they were dishes for a king is to understate the fact.

It is therefore merely in the public interest and from no sense of personal vanity that I reproduce the substance of one or two of them in this preface. There was a whole section, for example, on Eggs, which I am extremely loath to lose. It showed how by holding an egg down under boiling water till it is exhausted, it may be first cooked and then be passed under a flat iron until it becomes an Egg Pancake. It may be then given a thin coat of varnish and served in a railway restaurant for years and years.

I had also an excellent recipe for Rum Omelette. It read: "Take a dipper full of rum and insert an omelette in it. Serve anywhere in Ontario." I am convinced that this recipe alone would have been worth its weight in rum.

But it would be childish of me to lay too much stress on my own personal disappointment or regret. When I realized what had happened I felt at once that my co-operation in this book must take some other form. I therefore sent to the editors a second telegram which read:

"Am willing to eat free of charge all dishes contained in volume."

This offer was immediately accepted, and I am happy to assure readers of this book that I have eaten each and every one of the preparations in the pages that follow. To prevent all doubt I make this statement under oath. I had intended to make merely an honest statement of the fact but my friends tell me that a statement under oath is better in such a case than a mere honest statement.