with
an allowance of bread, made up the dinner. There were some potatoes,
fried with great skill, amid much of the compound we had agreed to
call butter. But, as I explained to G. in reply to a deprecatory
gesture when he took away the floating mass untouched, I have not
for more than three years been able to eat a potato. One of my
relations was, about that date, choked by a piece of potato, and
since then I have never touched them, especially when fried in a
great deal of butter.

We had some cheese, for which Earl Granville's family motto would
serve as literal description. You might bend it, but could not
break it. I never was partial to bent cheese, but we made a fair
appearance with this part of the feast, owing to the arrival of
G.'s dog, a miserable-looking cur, attracted to the banquet-hall
by unwonted savours. He seemed to like the cheese; and G., when he
came in with the coffee, was more than ever pleased with our
appreciation of the good things provided for us.

"Rosbif and chiss--ha!" he said, breaking forth into English, and
smiling knowingly upon us.

He felt he had probed the profoundest depths of the Englishman's
gastronomical weakness.

With the appearance of the coffee the real pleasure of the evening
commenced. Along nearly the whole of one side of the banquet-hall
ran a fireplace, a recess of the proportions of a spare bedroom in
an ordinary English house. There were no "dogs" or other contrivance
for minimising the spontaneity of a fire. There are granite quarries
near, and these had contributed an enormous block which formed a
hearth raised about six inches above the level of the floor. On this
an armful of brushwood was placed; and the match applied, it began
to burn with cheerful crackling laughter and pleasant flame,
filling the room with a fragrant perfume. For all other light a
feeble oil lamp twinkled high up on the wall, and a candle burned
on the table where we had so luxuriantly dined.

The fitful light shone on the oil paintings which partly hid the
damp on the walls. There was a picture (not a bad one) of St.
Sebastian pierced with arrows, and in his death-agony turning
heavenward a beautiful face. There was the portrait of another
monk holding on to a ladder, each rung of which was labelled with
a cardinal virtue. There was a crucifixion or two, and what
elsewhere might well pass for a family portrait--an elderly lady,
with a cap of the period, nursing a spaniel. The damp had s