Never cut meat with your teaspoon, sip tea from a fork, or painfully suggest sword-swallowing by eating with your knife. Try to appear civilized.
Never convey the impression that you are shoveling food down an excavation rather than eating it. Cultivated people eat, barbarians engulf.
Never smack the lips and roll the eyes while masticating, accompanying the operation with such expressions as, “Oh, golly, but that’s good!” “Aha, that touches the spot!” Give your neighbors a show.
Never reach far over the table with both hands for a coveted morsel. Ask for it, call a servant, or circulate around the table behind the other breakfasters’ chairs.
Never shake your fist at the waiters, or swear at them in loud and imperious tones. This is not the best form even in a restaurant.
Never pounce on a particular morsel, intended for an invalid, like a hawk on a June-bug. First, say to yourself reflectively, “Am I in a private breakfast-room or a barn?”
Never try to dispose of beefsteak, peach-jam and coffee at the same mouthful. Failure, complete and ignominious, will be the result.
Never, if at a tenth-rate boarding-house, insist upon having broiled game. In the bright lexicon of the boarding-house there’s no such word as quail.
Never, unless you are John L. Sullivan, indicate your irritation by upsetting the table, or shying muffins at the landlord. Equability of temper and a good appetite should go hand in hand.
Never fail in urbanity with those around you. Loud squabbling, fighting with the feet under the table, and open rivalry for the smiles of a pretty waitress are altogether alien to the higher culture.
Never make a pretense, on quitting the table, of mistaking the napkin for your handkerchief. This is an old, old dodge.
Never stretch yourself, gulch, gape and yawp on rising. You should have finished all that in bed.
Never refer to the meal you have disposed of under the generic name of “hash.” The commonness of this fault does not excuse it.
Never fail in bowing gracefully when abandoning the table, and, in lighting your cigar, never strike a match on your hostess’s back. Be keenly observant of your well-bred neighbors, and you will at last learn to avoid these little breaches of etiquette that are so painstakingly enumerated for your cultivation.
