answered to that enthusiastic description of Disraeli's in
_Coningsby_--perhaps the finest eulogy of the English inn ever written.

Unhappily, they are gone to make way for garish, reeking hotels and
restaurants for which one has to dress. Those that remain are mere
drinking-places; you can, if you wish, get a dusty sandwich, but the
barmaid regards you as an idiot if you ask for one. But there are
exceptions.

"The Cock," immortalized by Tennyson, is one of the few survivals of the
simple, and its waiters are among the best in London. As a rule, the
English waiter is bad and the foreign waiter is good. But when you get a
good English waiter you get the very best waiter in the world. There is
Albert--no end of a good fellow. He shares with all English waiters a
fine disregard for form; yet he has that indefinable majesty which no
Continental has ever yet assimilated; and he has, too, a nice sense of
the needs of those who work in Fleet Street. You can go to Albert (that
isn't his true name) and say--

"Albert, I haven't much money to-day. What's good and what do I get most
of for tenpence?" Or "Albert--I've had a cheque to-day. What's best--and
damn the expense?" And Albert advises you in each emergency, and whether
you tip him twopence or a shilling you receive the same polite "Much
obliged, sir!"

Georgie and I began to remember feeds we had had in London--real feeds,
I mean; not "dinners," but the kind of food you yearn for when you are
hungry, and have, perhaps, only eleven pennies in your pocket. At these
times you are not interested in Rumpelmayer's for tea, or Romano's for
lunch, or the Savoy for dinner. Nix. It's Lockhart's, The A B C.,
cook-shops, coffee-stalls, cab-shelters, and the hundred other what-not
feeding-bins of London. I talked of the Welsh rarebits at "The Old
Bell," the theatrical house in Wellington Street, and of the Friday
night tripe-and-onion suppers at "The Plough," Clapham. Georgie thought
that his fourpenny feed in the cab-shelter at Duncannon Street was an
easy first, until I asked him if he knew the eating-houses of the South
London Road, and his hard face cracked to a smile. I was telling him
how, when I first had a definite commission from a tremendous editor, I
had touched a friend for two shillings, and, walking home, had stopped
in the London Road and had ordered dishes which were billed on the menu
as _Pudding_, _boiled and cauli_. FOLLOW _Golden Roll_; and this, capped
by a pin