The elder man stared as if he couldn’t fancy it. “In Paris I’m very apt to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter. Don’t you know, what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.” “No more you can!” And this candid critic unfolded his napkin. The other paid no heed whatever to his candour. “I say,” the latter resumed in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I suppose we must take lessons.” “I can’t make them out, you know,” said the clever man. “What the deuce is _he_ saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the French waiter. “He’s recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man. And so, in a desultory view of the mysteries of the new world bristling about them, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine—going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, as to which their attendant submitted to them a hundred alternatives. After dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighbouring streets. The early dusk of waning summer was at hand, but the heat still very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot-soles of the British travellers, and the trees along the kerb-stone emitted strange exotic odours. The young men wandered through the adjoining square—that queer place without palings and with marble walks arranged in black and white lozenges. There were a great many benches crowded with shabby-looking people, and the visitors remarked very justly that it wasn’t much like Grosvenor Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open and brightly-lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horse-cars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, a sinister hum of mosquitoes. The ground-floor of the hotel, figuring a huge transparent cage, flung a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passers-by promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with every one else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, their legs variously stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket-office of a railway station, before a vast marble altar of sacrifice, a thing shaped like the counter of a huge shop. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their hands, had a dejected exhausted look; their garments were not fresh, as if telling of some rush, or some fight, for life, and they seemed to render mystic tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed moustache and a shirt front adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped a cold glance over their multitudinous patience. They were American citizens doing homage to an hotel-clerk.