Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops. But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir.