Hotel Breakfast.
Always take butter with the butter-knife, and then do not forget to return that knife to the butter-plate. Carefully avoid cutting bread with your own knife, or taking salt with it from the salt-cellar. It looks as if you had not been accustomed to butter-knives and salt-spoons.
Ladies no longer eat salt-fish at a public table. The odor of it is now considered extremely ungenteel, and it is always very disagreeable to those who do not eat it. If you breakfast alone, you can then indulge in it.
It is ungenteel to go to the breakfast-table in any costume approaching to full dress. There must be no flowers or ribbons in the hair. A morning-cap should be as simple as possible. The most genteel morning-dress is a close gown of some plain material, with long sleeves, which in summer may be white muslin. A merino or cashmere wrapper (gray, brown, purple, or olive), faced or trimmed with other merino of an entirely different color (such as crimson, scarlet, green, or blue), is a becoming morning-dress for winter. In summer, a white cambric-muslin morning-robe is the handsomest breakfast attire, but one of gingham or printed muslin the most convenient. The colored dress may be made open in front, with short, loose sleeves, and a pointed body. Beneath it a white under-dress, having a chemisette front down to the belt, and long white sleeves down to the wrist. This forms a very graceful morning-costume, the white skirt appearing where the colored skirt opens.
The fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete. It was always inconvenient, and neither useful nor ornamental.