bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in
simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner
than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant
sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from
the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark
antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to
Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express--

"But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than
last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend
exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:

Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering
afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of
souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But
starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since
leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is
truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for
our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty
minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was
the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been
left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our
train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and
bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there
are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when
one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as
one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton
kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's
chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at
home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and
all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops.
But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in
the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which
the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be
caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the
spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's
steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as
if they had