or to one of the little restaurants
which stud the valley and the hillsides, delightful little buildings
with great glass shelters for rainy days and lawns and flower-beds and
creepers, where neat waitresses in black, with their Christian names in
white metal worn as a brooch, or great numbers pinned to their
shoulders, receive you with laughing welcome, set a red-clothed table
for you, and bring you the hot milk and boiled eggs which complete your
repast. Be careful of which waitress you smile at on your first day, for
she claims you as her especial property for the rest of your stay, and
to ask another waitress to bring your eggs would be the deepest treason.

Dinner is a mid-day meal, and as you are not tied down to any particular
hotel for your meals because you happen to be staying in it, the custom
is to dine where your fancy pleases you. There is Pupp's with its
verandah and its little grove of Noah's ark trees, patronised by all
nations, and the Golden Shield and Anger's, and Wirchaupt's in the Alte
Wiese, which since I have known Carlsbad has grown from a ham shop into
a very smart little restaurant handsomely decorated. Wirchaupt's is
small enough still for its patrons to have individual attention paid
them, and if you are an _habitue_ you will be told as you go in if
anything especially good has been bought at market that morning, and
little hints are given you as to the composition of your meal. Bohemian
partridges and the trout and _Zander_ from the Tepl and other mountain
streams are the two great "stand-bys" of the man at Carlsbad who likes
good food; but the big fowls which come, I fancy, from Styria, are
excellent birds; the venison, the hares, the mutton, and the
ever-present ham are all capital. The wines of the country are
excellent. The cheapest form of the local wine is served in little
_caraffes_, but here, as in most other places, it is wise to pay the
extra shilling and drink the bottled wine. Besides the wine of the
province there are obtainable the usual Austrian wines, and the
Hungarian Erlauer and Offner and Carlowitz.

I have halted in the Alte Wiese to descant on the usual dinner of
Carlsbad, which, ordered _a la carte_, never costs more than a few
shillings. Up on the hill at the Bristol, from the terrace of which
there is a fine view over the valley to the Keilberg, and at the Savoy
Westend, where some Egyptian servants imported by Nuncovitch from the
land of the Pharoahs wait upon you