Having paid his court, you will suppose that our friend comes home to breakfast.  Not at all:  no such discovery as “breakfast” had then been made:  breakfast was not invented for many centuries after that.  We have always admired, and always shall admire, as the very best of all human stories, Charles Lamb’s account of the origin of roast pig in China.  Ching Ping, it seems, had suffered his father’s house to be burned down; the outhouses were burned along with the house; and in one of these the pigs, by accident, were roasted to a turn.  Memorable were the results for all future China and future civilization.  Ping, who (like all China beside) had hitherto eaten his pig raw, now for the first time tasted it in a state of torrefaction.  Of course he made his peace with his father by a part (tradition says a leg) of the new dish.  The father was so astounded with the discovery, that he burned his house down once a year for the sake of coming at an annual banquet of roast pig.  A curious prying sort of fellow, one Chang Pang, got to know of this.  He also burned down a house with a pig in it, and had his eyes opened.  The secret was ill kept—­the discovery spread—­many great conversions were made—­houses were blazing in every part of the Celestial Empire.  The insurance offices took the matter up.  One Chong Pong, detected in the very act of shutting up a pig in his drawing-room, and then firing a train, was indicted on a charge of arson.  The chief justice of Pekin, on that occasion, requested an officer of the court to hand him a piece of the roast pig, the corpus delicti, for pure curiosity led him to taste; but within two days after it was observed that his lordship’s town-house was burned down.  In short, all China apostatized to the new faith; and it was not until some centuries had passed, that a great genius arose, who established the second era in the history of roast pig, by showing that it could be had without burning down a house.

No such genius had yet arisen in Rome.  Breakfast was not suspected.  No prophecy, no type of breakfast had been published.  In fact, it took as much time and research to arrive at that great discovery as at the Copernican system.  True it is, reader, that you have heard of such a word as jentaculum; and your dictionary translates that old heathen word by the Christian word breakfast.  But dictionaries, one and all, are dull deceivers.  Between jentaculum and breakfast the differences are as wide as between a horse-chestnut and chestnut horse; differences in the time when, in the place where, in the manner how, but preeminently in the thing which.