'Cheese' are always furious. Old customers abound in the comfortable
old tavern, in whose sanded-floored eating-rooms a new face is a rarity;
and the guests and the waiters are the oldest of familiars. Yet the
waiter seldom fails to bite your nose off as a preliminary measure when
you proceed to pay him. How should it be otherwise when on that waiter's
soul there lies heavy a perpetual sense of injury caused by the savoury
odour of steaks, and 'muts' to follow; of cheese-bubbling in tiny
tins--the 'specialty' of the house; of floury potatoes and fragrant
green peas; of cool salads, and cooler tankards of bitter beer; of
extra-creaming stout and 'goes' of Cork and 'rack,' by which is meant
gin; and, in the winter-time, of Irish stew and rump-steak pudding,
glorious and grateful to every sense? To be compelled to run to and fro
with these succulent viands from noon to late at night, without being
able to spare time to consume them in comfort--where do waiters dine,
and when, and how?--to be continually taking other people's money only
for the purpose of handing it to other people--are not these grievances
sufficient to cross-grain the temper of the mildest-mannered waiter?
Somebody is always in a passion at the 'Cheese:' either a customer,
because there is not fat enough on his 'point'-steak, or because there
is too much bone in his mutton-chop; or else the waiter is wrath with
the cook; or the landlord with the waiter, or the barmaid with all. Yes,
there is a barmaid at the 'Cheese,' mewed up in a box not much bigger
than a birdcage, surrounded by groves of lemons, 'ones' of cheese,
punch-bowls, and cruets of mushroom-catsup. I should not care to dispute
with her, lest she should quoit me over the head with a punch-ladle,
having a William-the-Third guinea soldered in the bowl.

"Let it be noted in candour that Law finds its way to the 'Cheese' as
well as Literature; but the Law is, as a rule, of the non-combatant and,
consequently, harmless order. Literary men who have been called to the
bar, but do not practise; briefless young barristers, who do not object
to mingling with newspaper men; with a sprinkling of retired solicitors
(amazing dogs these for old port-wine; the landlord has some of the same
bin which served as Hippocrene to Judge Blackstone when he wrote his
'Commentaries')--these make up the legal element of the 'Cheese.' Sharp
attorneys in practice are not popular there. There is a legend that a
process-serve