em,--for that was before I rode in Madam
Waldoborough's carriage.

"Cox's, I fancy, is the crack hotel of London. Lady Byron boarded there;
the author of 'Childe Harold' himself used to stop there; Tom Moore
wrote a few of his last songs and drank a good many of his last bottles
of wine there; my Lords Tom, Dick, and Harry,--the Duke of Dash, Sir
Edward Splash, and Viscount Flash,--these and other notables always
honor Cox's when they go to town. So _we_ honored Cox's. And a very
quiet, orderly, well-kept tavern we found it. I think Mr. Cox must have
a good housekeeper. He has been fortunate in securing a very excellent
cook. I should judge that he had engaged some of the finest gentlemen in
England to act as waiters. Their manners would do credit to any
potentate in Europe: there is that calm self-possession about them, that
serious dignity of deportment, sustained by a secure sense of the mighty
importance of their mission to the world which strikes a beholder with
awe. I was made to feel very inferior in their presence. We dined at a
private table, and these ministers of state waited upon us. They brought
us the morning paper on a silver salver; they presented it as if it had
been a mission from a king to a king. Whenever we went out or came in,
there stood two of those magnates, in white waistcoats and white gloves,
to open the folding-doors for us, with stately mien. You would have said
it was the Lord High Chamberlain and his deputy, and that I was at least
Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James. I tried to receive
these overpowering attentions with an air of easy indifference, like one
who had been all his life accustomed to that sort of thing, you know;
but I was oppressed with a terrible sense of being out of my place. I
couldn't help feeling that these serene and lofty highnesses knew
perfectly well that I was a green Yankee boy, with less than fifty
pounds in my pocket; and I fancied that, behind the mask of gravity each
imperturbable countenance wore, there was always lurking a smile of
contempt.

"But this was not the worst of it. I suffered from another cause. If
noblemen were my attendants, I must expect to maintain noblemen. All
that ceremony and deportment must go into the bill. With this view of
the case, I could not look at their white kids without feeling sick at
heart; white waistcoats became a terror; the sight of an august
neckcloth, bowing its solemn attentions to me, depressed my ve