A gaunt, ossified waiter, with blue black hair, jaws so closely shaven that they gave him an unpleasant resemblance to the grand inquisitor of the holy office in disguise seeking for heretics in a cook-shop, and who was, besides, in a perpetual cold perspiration of anger against the irate man in the shooting jacket below, and carried on fierce verbal warfare with him down the staircase. This waiter rose up against me, rather than addressed me, and charged me with a pike of bread, cutting my ordinarily immense slice from it. I mildly suggested roast beef, wincing, it must be owned, under the eye of the cadaverous waiter; who looked as if he were accustomed to duplicity, and did not believe a word that I was saying. “Ah! rosbif!” he echoed, “bien saignant n’est ce pas?” Now, so far from liking my meat “bien saignant” I cannot even abide the sight of it rare, and I told him so. But he repeated “bien saignant,” and vanished. He came again, though; or rather his Jesuitical head protruded itself over the top of the box where I sat (there were boxes at His Lordship’s) and asked: “Paint portare? p’lale? ole’ ale?” I was nettled, and told him sharply that I would try the wine, if he could recommend it. Whereupon there was silence, and then I heard a voice crying down a pipe, “Paint portare!” He brought me my dinner, and I didn’t like it. It was bien saignant, but it wasn’t beef, and it swam in a dead sea of gravy that was not to my taste; fat from strange animals seemed to have been grafted on to the lean. I did not get on better with the potatoes, which were full of promise, like a park hack, and unsatisfactory in the performance. I tried some plum-pudding afterwards; but, if the proof of the pudding be in the eating, that pudding remains unproved to this day; for, when I tried to fix my fork in it, it rebounded away across the room, and hit the black man on the leg. I would rather not say anything about the porter, if you please; and perhaps it is well to be brief on the subject of the glass of hot gin-and-water I tried afterwards, in a despairing attempt to be convivial; for it smelt of the midnight-lamp like an erudite book, and of the midnight oilcan, and had the flavour of the commercial terebinthium, rather than of the odoriferous Juniperus. I consoled myself with some Cheshire cheese, and asked the waiter if he had the Presse. “Ze Time is gage,” he answered. I did not want the Times. I wanted the Presse. “Sare,” he repeated wrathfully, “Ze Time is gage. Le Journal Anglais (he accentuated this spitefully) is gage.”