rence in an English steamer, where everything is not so
much English as John Bull-y. The servants at the table are thoroughly
and amusingly yellow-plush,--if that is the word I want, and if it is
not that, it is another; for I am quite sure of my idea, though not of
the name that belongs to it. The servants are smooth and sleek and
intense. They serve as if it was their business, and a weighty
business at that, demanding all the energies of a created being.
Accordingly they give their minds to it. The chieftain yonder, in
white choker and locks profusely oiled and brushed into a resplendent
expanse, bears Atlas on his shoulders. His lips are compressed, his
brow contracted, his eyes alert, his whole manner as absorbed as if it
were a nation, and not a plum-pudding, that he is engineering through a
crisis. Lord Palmerston is nothing to him, I venture to say. I know
the only way to accomplish anything is to devote yourself to it; still
I cannot conceive how anybody can give himself up so completely to a
dinner, even if it is his business and duty. However, I have nothing to
complain of in the results, for we are well served, only for a trifle
too much obviousness. Order and system are undoubtedly good things,
but I don't like to see an ado made about them. Our waiters stand
behind, at given stations, with prophetic dishes in uplifted hands,
and, at a certain signal from the arch-waiter, down they come like the
clash of fate. Now I suppose this is all very well, but for me I never
was fond of military life. Under my housekeeping we browse
indiscriminately. When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal. If
it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner. If it is nearer
night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fashionable friends
with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch; and ten
to one it is so scattered about that it has no name at all. At
breakfast you will be likely to find me on the door-step with a bowl of
bread and milk, while Halicarnassus sits on the bench opposite and
brandishes a chicken-bone with the cat mewing furiously for it at his
feet. A surreptitious doughnut is sweet and dyspeptic over the morning
paper, and gingerbread is always to be had by systematic and
intelligent foraging. Consequently this British drill and discipline
are thoroughly alarming to me, and I am surprised and grateful to find
that we are not individually regulated by a time-table. I expe