to me that the great men of the old world
regard our country thoughtfully. It is a new development of society,
acting every day with greater and greater power on the old world; nor is
it yet clearly seen what its final results will be. His observations
indicated a calm, clear, thoughtful mind--an accurate observer of life
and history.

Meanwhile the servants moved noiselessly to and fro, taking up the
various articles on the table, and offering them to the guests in a
peculiarly quiet manner. One of the dishes brought to me was a plover's
nest, precisely as the plover made it, with five little blue speckled
eggs in it. This mode of serving plover's eggs, as I understand it, is
one of the fashions of-the day, and has something quite sylvan and
picturesque about it; but it looked so, for all the world, like a
robin's nest that I used to watch out in our home orchard, that I had it
not in my heart to profane the sanctity of the image by eating one of
the eggs.

The _cuisine_ of these West End regions appears to be entirely under
French legislation, conducted by Parisian artists, skilled in all subtle
and metaphysical combinations of ethereal possibilities, quite
inscrutable to the eye of sense. Her grace's _chef_, I have heard it
said elsewhere, bears the reputation of being the first artist of his
class in England. The profession as thus sublimated bears the same
proportion to the old substantial English cookery that Mozart's music
does to Handel's, or Midsummer Night's Dream to Paradise Lost.

This meal, called _lunch_, is with the English quite an institution,
being apparently a less elaborate and ceremonious dinner. Every thing is
placed upon the table at once, and ladies sit down without removing
their bonnets; it is, I imagine, the most social and family meal of the
day; one in which children are admitted to the table, even in the
presence of company. It generally takes place in the middle of the day,
and the dinner, which comes after it, at eight or nine in the evening,
is in comparison only a ceremonial proceeding.

I could not help thinking, as I looked around on so many men whom I had
heard of historically all my life, how very much less they bear the
marks of age than men who have been connected a similar length of time
with the movements of our country. This appearance of youthfulness and
alertness has a constantly deceptive influence upon one in England. I
cannot realize that people are as old as history