Never cool your tea or coffee by pouring it back and forth from cup to saucer and from saucer to cup in a high arching torrent, after the manner of a diamond-fastened bar-tender with a cocktail or julep. There’s a time and place for everything.
Never suck your knife contemplatively, and then dive it in the butter-dish. This is wholly indefensible.
Never use the butter-knife in besmearing and plastering your bread with butter an inch thick. Better tear up the bread in small chunks, and sop up the butter with it.
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.