Grow Fat and Laugh.

One more glance. The kitchen.

It requires a descriptive succulence and a mouth-watering toothsomeness in words to convey the sense of the raising of a domestic art, here into the realm of high industry. Magnify the home dining-room until it serves 1,200 meals a day, in holiday time up to 2,100 meals a day, and throw in a few extra 1,600 served in the cafeteria. Then imagine the kitchen organization, not as something impersonal as large figures suggest, but a place that will make you smile at the sight of good food in the necessarily large quantities. Moreover, you will chuckle in contact with enthusiasm bubbling over a stock pot, as the manager shows you all the devices of his electrically equipped kitchen.

Thinking of his eager and vital delight in it all I felt that somewhere I had met him before, perhaps not the man, but at least his spirit. It is linked with a mental picture of a slightly built, quick Bavarian engineering student in Cologne. He was showing a bevy of British colonial women students the cathedrals of the city. At every corner he counted his flock, talking eagerly at the same time of architecture, and taking this place and that almost at a run, until having exhausted religious art, and his audience also, he led the women to the original eau de Cologne shop and doused them with scent. Then he cupped his own hands and, with a supreme gesture of satisfaction, washed his face in the cooling liquid.

The same self-abandonment in a cause was here. But this spirit and enthusiasm, instead of being expended on the culture of Gothic, or Romanesque appreciation, reached up to something that touched a more urgent craving in every man, and something that every woman aspires to on a smaller scale to satisfy that three times daily recurring craving.

It is no descent into the mundane to stand by a tier of electric ovens, or a long bench of gas automatic fish friers, to watch a cutter that will chop up anything from beans to breadcrumbs, and even grate cheese, and to marvel at the simplicity of electric potato peelers which take the drudgery out of culinary art. Art, indeed, now. Everything reduced to a fine art.

It is heart-warming — when the stomach is full the heart glows—to see the soup urns, the pie urns in the steam-heated serving table, the carving of the brown joints, which, when disposed among the vegetables, would make a picture for one of those full-bellied old masters who spread their rich pigments over the scene of Dutch domestic life.

Ah! That is who should paint the picture of the Wellington Railway Station. A Dutch master doing lofty interiors, but one sufficiently modern to joy in the light of many windows.

(By A. J. G. Schmitt .)