_Cheshire Cheese Pudding_. A little way up a gloomy court on the north side of Fleet Street--a neighbourhood which reeks of printers' ink, bookmakers' "runners," tipsters, habitual borrowers of small pieces of silver, and that "warm" smell of burning paste and molten lead which indicates the "foundry" in a printing works--is situated this ancient hostelry. It is claimed for the "Cheese" that it was the tavern most frequented by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Mr. C. Redding, in his _Fifty Years' Recollections, Literary and Personal_, published in 1858, says: "I often dined at the "_Cheshire Cheese_." Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The company was more select than in later times, but there are Fleet Street tradesmen who well remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment." Few Americans who visit our metropolis go away without making a pilgrimage to this ancient hostelry, where, upstairs, "Doctor Johnson's Chair" is on view; and many visitors carry away mementoes of the house, in the shape of pewter measures, the oaken platters upon which these are placed, and even samples of the long "churchwarden" pipes, smoked by _habitués_ after their evening chops or steaks. _Ye Pudding_, which is served on Wednesdays and Saturdays, at 1.30 and 6.0, is a formidable-looking object, and its savour reaches even into the uttermost parts of Great Grub Street. As large, more or less, as the dome of St. Paul's, that pudding is stuffed with steak, kidney, oysters, mushrooms, and larks. The irreverent call these last named sparrows, but we know better. This pudding takes (_on dit_) 17½ hours in the boiling, and the "bottom crust" would have delighted the hearts of Johnson, Boswell, and Co., in whose days the savoury dish was not. The writer once witnessed a catastrophe at the "Cheshire Cheese," compared to which the burning of Moscow or the bombardment of Alexandria were mere trifles. 1.30 on Saturday afternoon had arrived, and the oaken benches in the refectory were filled to repletion with expectant pudding-eaters. Burgesses of the City of London were there--good, "warm," round-bellied men, with plough-boys' appetites--and journalists, and advertising agents, and "resting" actors, and magistrates' clerks, and barristers from the Temple, and well-to-do tradesmen. Sherry and gin and bitters and other adventitious aids (?) to appetite had been done justice to, and the arrival of the "procession"--it takes three men and a boy to carry the _pièce de résistance_ from the kitchen to the dining-room--was anxiously awaited. And then, of a sudden we heard a loud crash! followed by a feminine shriek, and an unwhispered Saxon oath. "Tom" the waiter had slipped, released his hold, and the pudding had fallen