"I care very little about dinners, but I shall not easily forget a _matelote_ at the 'Rochers de Cancale,' or an almond tart at Montreuil, or a _poulet a la Tartare_ at Grignon's. These are impressions which no changes in future life can obliterate." I am tempted to pursue the line of thought thus invitingly opened, but I forbear; for it really has no special connexion with the retrospective vein. I am now describing the years 1876-1880, and dinners then were pretty much what they are now. The new age of dining had begun. Those frightful hecatombs of sheep and oxen which Francatelli decreed had made way for more ethereal fare. The age-long tyranny of "The Joint" was already undermined. I have indeed been one of a party of forty in the dog-days, where a belated haunch of venison cried aloud for decent burial; but such outrages were even then becoming rare. The champagne of which a poet had beautifully said: "How sad and bad and mad it was, And Oh! how it was sweet!" had been banished in favour of the barely alcoholic liquor which foams in modern glasses. And, thanks to the influence of King Edward VII, after-dinner drinking had been exorcised by cigarettes. The portentous piles of clumsy silver which had overshadowed our fathers' tables--effigies of Peace and Plenty, Racing Cups and Prizes for fat cattle--had been banished to the plate-closets; bright china and brighter flowers reigned in their stead. In short, a dinner thirty-five years ago was very like a dinner to-day. It did not take me long to find that (with Cardinal Grandison) "I liked dinner-society very much," and that "you see the world there and hear things which you do not hear otherwise."