Ordering dinner was an interesting business. There was no menu card. Monsieur and his family talked a kind of French which none of us could ever understand. Also they talked at a terrific speed and all at once, circling round us. We knew that they were naming the kinds of food available, for we caught words like _potage_ and _poisson_ now and then. Our plan was to sit still and nod occasionally. One of the daughters made a note of the points at which we nodded, and we hoped for the best. The soup was generally ready. Everything else was cooked before our eyes on the fire behind the family table. Madame did the cooking. The rest of the party sat down again to their own meal. Monsieur exhorted his wife occasionally. The daughters took it in turn to get up and bring us each course as madame finished cooking it. In this way we got a hot and excellent dinner. A good digestion was promoted by the long gaps between the courses. It was impossible to eat fast. Monsieur offered his guests no great choice in wine, but what he had was surprisingly good. When dinner was over and the bill, a very moderate one, paid, the whole family shook hands with us again and wished us every kind of happiness and good luck. Monsieur then conducted us to a back door, and let us loose into an alley quite as dark and filthy as the one by which we entered. He was always firm about refusing to allow us to go by the way we came. I have no idea what his reasons were, but the plan of smuggling us out of the establishment gave us a pleasurable feeling that we had been breaking some law by being there. There is nothing that I ever could find in King's Regulations on the subject, so I suppose that if we sinned at all it must have been against some French municipal regulation. That restaurant may be quite popular now; it was getting better known even in my time. But if it becomes popular it will lose its charm. Monsieur and his family will no longer be able to shake hands with every guest. There may be table-cloths. The hens--I always thought they were the _poulets_ we ate fattened before our eyes--will be banished, and some officious A.P.M. will put the place out of bounds, suspecting it to be a haunt of vice. Its look and its smell, I admit, would arouse suspicion in the mind of any conscientious A.P.M., but Monsieur's patrons, if rough, were respectable people. Even the A.S.C. officers were above reproach. They looked like men who were satisfied at having discovered the best and cheapest dinner to be got in that town. I doubt whether they had even appreciated the eccentricities of the service.