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 though many soups are better the second day, when one is more used to the flavor. Originally, the word was "soppe," referring to the piece of bread which, before the Ladies' Home Journal was published, was put to soak in the soup. A fifteenth-century cook-book defines it thus: "Soupe—a sop or peece of bread in broth, also pottage or broth, wherein there is store of sops or sippets."

The eating or drinking of soup is a fine test of table manners. To sip silently from a spoon, with apparent pleasure, a sizzling hot liquid which one does not like, is as fine a tribute to one's host as that paid by a foreign diplomat to a Washington lady, when he nobly ate the small green worm which was fain to share his salad.

Yet there are so many soups that he who likes none of them is indeed hard to please, When the flavor of a wild beast is unpleasing, a tame one may be relished, and vice verse. Even the meek and lowly vegetarian need not sit hungry during the soup course, since there are many soups made wholly of fruits and vegetables and cabbage, which it is impossible to classify under any known head except its own.

One who will take the life of a cabbage need not hesitate at chicken or turkey, for cabbage has life—triumphant, dominant, compelling,