omeliness which one
encounters at every turn in the midst of the massive luxury and general
expensiveness of England--like the big, staring announcement, _Beds_,
in the coffee-house windows, or _Well-aired Beds_ painted on the side
walls of taverns; or like a list of labels which I noticed the other
day on a series of japanned boxes in a pastry-cook's shop. They seemed
to me so characteristic that I made a note of them.

The reason of my being in the pastry-cook's shop was my having
contracted in Paris the harmless habit of resorting to one of these
establishments at the luncheon hour, for the purpose of consuming a
little _gateau_. Resuming this innocent practice on English soil, I
found it attended with serious difficulties--the chief of which was
that there were no _gateaux_ to consume. An appreciative memory of
those brightly mirrored little shops on the Paris boulevards, in which
tender little tarts, in bewildering variety, are dispensed to you by a
neat-waisted _patissiere_, cast a dusky shadow over the big buns and
"digestive biscuits" which adorn the counter of an English bakery. But
it takes a good while to eat a bun, and while you stand there solemnly
disintegrating your own, you may look about you in search of the
characteristic. In Paris the pastry-cooks' shops are, as the French
say, coquettish--as coquettish as the elegant simplicity of plate
glass, discreet gilding, polished brass, and a demonstrative _dame de
comptoir_ can make them. In London they are not coquettish--witness
the grim nomenclature alluded to above; it was distributed over a
series of green tin cases, ranged behind the counters: Tops and
bottoms--royal digestives--arrow-root--oat-cake--rice biscuit--ratafias.

I took my seat in the grill-room at a table at which three gentlemen
were sitting: two of them sleek British merchants, of a familiar and
highly respectable type, the other a merchant too, presumably, but
neither sleek nor British. He was evidently an American. He was a
good-looking fellow and a man of business, but I inferred from the
tentative, experimental, and even mistrustful manner with which he
addressed himself to the operation of lunching, and observed the
idiosyncrasies of the grill-room, that he found himself for the first
time in England. His experiment, however, if experiment it was, was
highly successful; he made a copious lunch and departed. He had not had
time to reach the door when I perceived one of the British me