ox's prescription--it was part of a strange inevitability, a
concomitant of necessary shelter and we hadn't at least gone forth to
invoke its austere charm. I tried it, in that singular way, at the hour
I speak of--and I well remember forecasting the interest of a social and
moral order in which it could be supposed of me that, having tried it
once, I should sublimely try it again. My success in doing so would
indeed have been sublime, but a finer shade of the quality still
attached somehow to my landlord's confidence in it; and this was one of
the threads that, as I have called them, I was to tuck away for future
picking-up again and unrolling. I fell back on the Albany, which long
ago passed away and which I seem to have brushed with a touch of
reminiscence in some anticipation of the present indulgence that is
itself quite ancient history. It was a small eating-house of the very
old English tradition, as I then supposed at least, just opposite the
much greater establishment of the same name, which latter it had
borrowed, and I remember wondering whether the tenants of the classic
chambers, the beadle-guarded cluster of which was impressive even to the
deprecated approach, found their conception of the "restaurant"--we
still pronounced it in the French manner--met by the small compartments,
narrow as horse-stalls, formed by the high straight backs of hard wooden
benches and accommodating respectively two pairs of feeders, who were
thus so closely face to face as fairly to threaten with knife and fork
each others' more forward features.

The scene was sordid, the arrangements primitive, the detail of the
procedure, as it struck me, well-nigh of the rudest; yet I remember
rejoicing in it all--as one indeed might perfectly rejoice in the
juiciness of joints and the abundance of accessory pudding; for I said
to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this
was what it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one
could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's
elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittence of the "plain
boiled," much better than one could dispense with that. There were
restaurants galore even at that time in New York and in Boston, but I
had never before had to do with an eating-house and had not yet seen the
little old English world of Dickens, let alone of the ever-haunting
Hogarth, of Smollett and of Boswell, drenched with such a flood of