ld
take our departure.

Of course all this made up the sum total of a pretty good snack--I mean
a good, well-sustained feast--but whether it was owing to the excellence
of the viands, or to the fact that we took our pleasures not sadly but
deliberately, I for one cannot remember ever feeling the worse for my
little-indulgences. Perhaps something was owing to the glorious
continuity of our feasting and pleasure.

I also remember once being at an unfrugal, old-fashioned, festive dinner
at a friend's house, when one of the guests proposed our host's health,
and finished up by saying, "I shall be glad to see everyone at this
table to dinner at my house this day week." Considering there were about
thirty persons sitting round the mahogany this was a fair-sized order.
But it was no empty compliment. The dinner came off, and a fine good
spread it was, and as for the wine I seem to sniff its "bouquet" now.

Some of the old Birmingham men whose characteristic hospitalities I have
just described had, as is pretty well known, certain habits which,
looked at by modern light, would seem somewhat plebeian. For instance,
there were men of wealth and importance who made it their custom often
to go and spend an hour or two in the evening at some of the old
respectable hotels and inns of the town. They had been in the habit of
meeting together at these hostelries in their earlier days to talk over
the news, at a period when daily local newspapers were not published,
and they adhered to the custom in their advanced years and wealthier
position, and rejoiced in visiting their old haunts and smoking their
long clay pipes, and having a chat with old friends and kindred spirits.

All this has died out now. For one thing, most of these old inns and
hostelries have disappeared with the march of modern times. We have
clubs now and restaurants, also hotels, where visitors "put up," but the
old-fashioned inns and taverns have mostly gone. The present generation
of prosperous well-to-do men, too, are of a different stamp from their
predecessors. They do not take their ease at their inns after the manner
of their fathers. They have been educated differently, and take their
pleasures in a more refined way, as is the fashion of the time.

Some of them have been to public schools and to the university, and
they naturally live their lives on a more elevated level. As a rule,
they are good, practical, straightforward, worthy men, though there are,
o