When you are visiting in the country and your hostess maintains a very small establishment, the servant may ask you, on awaking you, what you desire for breakfast. Out of consideration for your hostess you should ask for a very small and very simple breakfast. Try to confine yourself to grape fruit, oatmeal, bacon and eggs, corn bread, chicken mince, marmalade, coffee, honey, hot biscuits, and orange juice.
Parlor tricks are great assets in a week-ender. The most popular are moving the scalp and ears, cracking the knuckles, disjointing the thumbs, standing on the head, tearing a pack of cards, and dancing a cake walk.
When the host offers, after breakfast, to show you over the farm, gasp, and mention your rheumatism. Almost any lie is permissible to prevent so terrible a catastrophe.
Young girls, when visiting at a house party, should be quiet and gentle, well behaved and agreeable; but when at home there is no reason why they should not be perfectly natural.
The horrors of the guest room are too well-known to need enumeration, and can seldom be ameliorated. They are, roughly, as follows: The embroidered pillow slips, the egg-finished sheets, the drawer of the bureau that is warped and will not open, the rusty pins in the stony pincushion, the empty cut-glass cologne bottles, the blinds that bang in the night, the absence of hooks on which to hang your razor strop, the pictures of the “Huguenot Lovers” and Landseer’s “Sanctuary” over the headboard of the bed, the tendency of the maid to hide the matches, the dear little children in the nursery above you, the dead fly in the dried-up ink well, and the hidden radiator under the sofa.