tra humble. I tell him I don't want this
French thing--when I don't know what it is--and he must bring me some
of the other--which I never heard of--and when it comes I eat it, no
matter what it turns out to be, and try to look as if I was used to it,
but generally had it better cooked. But, as I said before, it is of no
use--your humbleness is too much for me. In a few days they will be
bringing us cold victuals, and recommending that we go outside
somewhere and eat them, as all the seats in the dining-room are wanted
for other people."

"Well," said Jone, "I must say I do feel a little overshadowed when I
go into that dining-room and see those proud and haughty waiters, some
of them with silver chains and keys around their necks, showing that
they are lords of the wine-cellar, and all of them with an air of lofty
scorn for the poor beings who have to sit still and be waited on; but
I'll try what I can do. As far as I am able, I'll hold up my end of the
social boom."

You may think I break off my letters sudden, madam, like the
instalments in a sensation weekly, which stops short in the most
harrowing parts, so as to make certain the reader will buy the next
number; but when I've written as much as I think two foreign stamps
will carry--for more than fivepence seems extravagant for a letter--I
generally stop.

_Letter Number Three_

[Illustration]

LONDON

At dinner-time the day when I had the conversation with Jone mentioned
in my last letter, we was sitting in the dining-room at a little table
in a far corner, where we'd never been before. Not being considered of
any importance they put us sometimes in one place and sometimes in
another, instead of giving us regular seats, as I noticed most of the
other people had, and I was looking around to see if anybody was ever
coming to wait on us, when suddenly I heard an awful noise.

I have read about the rumblings of earthquakes, and although I never
heard any of them, I have felt a shock, and I can imagine the awfulness
of the rumbling, and I had a feeling as if the building was about to
sway and swing as they do in earthquakes. It wasn't all my imagining,
for I saw the people at the other tables near us jump, and two waiters
who was hurrying past stopped short as if they had been jerked up by a
curb bit. I turned to look at Jone, but he was sitting up straight in
his chair, as solemn and as steadfast as a gate-post, and I thought to
myself that if he had