the most pleasant place to dine in Brussels. In the Bois there are
several places that supply lunches, dinners, and light refreshments, but
the Laiterie is the only one that is really first class. For seventeen
years it has been under the management of M. Artus and his son. The
establishment is the property of the town of Brussels, and is well kept
up in every respect. Here on a Sunday as many as 1500 chairs and 400
tables are often occupied. In the evenings the gardens are brilliantly
illuminated, there being 1100 gas lamps. Music is discoursed by a
Tzigane orchestra, and the late Queen of the Belgians, who often used to
stop her pony chaise at the Laiterie to hear them play, subscribed from
her private purse 200 francs every year to these musicians. Dinners are
served at separate tables, under Japanese umbrellas, and the cooking is
excellent; but it is as well to secure a seat as near to the main
building as possible, to overcome that objection to _al-fresco_
meals--cold dishes. The wines are good, and M. Artus has some fine
Ayala--'93, in magnums--unless it is all drunk by now. There must be
something about the cellars of these out-door places peculiarly
favourable to beer, for no pale ale in the world can compare with that
drawn at the bars of the Epsom grand-stand, and in Belgium there is no
bottled Bass so fresh and palatable as that which one gets at the
Laiterie.

If my friend were staying in Brussels longer than a week, the other
restaurants to which I might take him would be the Taverne Royale, at
the corner of the Galeries Saint Hubert, where some real 1865 cognac can
be had at 75 centimes the glass; the Freres Provencaux, in the Rue
Royale; the Restaurant de la Monnaie (a large place, generally noisy,
with not the most rapid of service); Stielen's, in the Rue de l'Eveque;
and the Taverne Restaurant des Eleveurs on the Avenue de la Toison d'Or.
At the Taverne de Londres, in the Rue de l'Ecuyer, there is always a
fine cut of cold roast beef with English pickles.

On Wednesdays all the Brussels restaurants are crowded, it being Bourse
day, and in a wide sense "market" day, when over 5000 strangers, mostly
men, come into the city from provincial towns. In conclusion, I may
mention that I have failed to discover the restaurant where George
Osborne gave his "great dinner" to the Bareacres a few days before the
battle of Waterloo. Thackeray records that as they came away from the
feast, Lord Bareacres asked to see