Always eat grapes downwards—that is, always eat the best grape first; in
this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will
seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have
a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be tempting Providence to
kill you before you come to the best. This is why autumn seems better
than spring: in the autumn we are eating our days downwards, in the
spring each day still seems “Very bad.” People should live on this
principle more than they do, but they do live on it a good deal; from the
age of, say, fifty we eat our days downwards.
In New Zealand for a long time I had to do the washing-up after each
meal. I used to do the knives first, for it might please God to take me
before I came to the forks, and then what a sell it would have been to
have done the forks rather than the knives!