hat it is: and in time you tire
of odds and ends, which destroy your hunger without exactly
satisfying you. For myself, after a pretty good run of French
cookery (and it beats the world for making the most out of little),
when I sat down again to what the eminently respectable waiter in
white and black calls "a dinner off the Joint, sir," with what
belongs to it, and ended up with an attack on a section of a cheese
as big as a bass-drum, not to forget a pewter mug of amber liquid, I
felt as if I had touched bottom again,--got something substantial,
had what you call a square meal. The English give you the
substantials, and better, I believe, than any other people.
Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good dinner now and
then. I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the cuisine of
which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I think if he,
hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he would have
gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.

And as for a lunch,--this eating is a fascinating theme,--commend me
to a quiet inn of England. We happened to be out at Kew Gardens the
other afternoon. You ought to go to Kew, even if the Duchess of
Cambridge is not at home. There is not such a park out of England,
considering how beautiful the Thames is there. What splendid trees
it has! the horse-chestnut, now a mass of pink-and-white blossoms,
from its broad base, which rests on the ground, to its high rounded
dome; the hawthorns, white and red, in full flower; the sweeps and
glades of living green,--turf on which you walk with a grateful sense
of drawing life directly from the yielding, bountiful earth,--a green
set out and heightened by flowers in masses of color (a great variety
of rhododendrons, for one thing), to say nothing of magnificent
greenhouses and outlying flower-gardens. Just beyond are Richmond
Hill and Hampton Court, and five or six centuries of tradition and
history and romance. Before you enter the garden, you pass the
green. On one side of it are cottages, and on the other the old
village church and its quiet churchyard. Some boys were playing
cricket on the sward, and children were getting as intimate with the
turf and the sweet earth as their nurses would let them. We turned
into a little cottage, which gave notice of hospitality for a
consideration; and were shown, by a pretty maid in calico, into an
upper room,--a neat, cheerful, common room, with bright flowers in