We talked of the old days--before I was born. Georgie told me of the crowd that decorated the place in the nineties: that company of feverish, foolish verbal confectioners who set themselves Byronically to ruin their healths and to write self-pitiful songs about the ruins. Half a dozen elegant Sadies and Mamies were at the American end of the bar, with their escorts, drinking Horse's Necks, Maiden's Prayers, Mother's Milks, Manhattans, and Scotch Highballs. Elsewhere the Cockney revellers were drinking their eternal whisky-and-sodas or beers, and their salutations led Georgie to a disquisition on the changing toasts of the last twenty years. To-day it is something short and sharp: either "Hooray!" or "Here's fun!" or "Cheero!" or a non-committal "Wow-wow!" Ten years back it was: "Well, Laddie, here's doing it again!" or "Good health, old boy, and may we get all we ask for!" And ten years before that it was something even more grandiloquent. From drink we drifted to talking about food; and I have already told you how wide is Georgie's knowledge of the business of feeding in London. We both hate the dreary, many-dished dinners of the hotels, and we both love the cosy little chop-houses, of which a few only now remain: one or two in Fleet Street, and perhaps half a dozen in the little alleys off Cornhill and Lombard Street. I agree, too, with Georgie in deploring the passing of the public-house mid-day ordinary. From his recollections, I learn that the sixties and seventies were the halcyon days for feeding--indeed, the only time when Londoners really lived; and an elderly uncle of mine, who, at that time, went everywhere and knew everybody in the true hard-up Bohemia, tells me that there were then twenty or thirty taverns within fifty yards of Ludgate Circus, where the shilling ordinary was a feast for an Emperor, and whose interiors answered to that enthusiastic description of Disraeli's in _Coningsby_--perhaps the finest eulogy of the English inn ever written. Unhappily, they are gone to make way for garish, reeking hotels and restaurants for which one has to dress. Those that remain are mere drinking-places; you can, if you wish, get a dusty sandwich, but the barmaid regards you as an idiot if you ask for one. But there are exceptions. "The Cock," immortalized by Tennyson, is one of the few survivals of the simple, and its waiters are among the best in London. As a rule, the English waiter is bad and the foreign waiter is good. But when you get a good English waiter you get the very best waiter in the world. There is Albert--no end of a good fellow. He shares with all English waiters a fine disregard for form; yet he has that indefinable majesty which no Continental has ever yet assimilated; and he has, too, a nice sense of the needs of those who work in Fleet Street. You can go to Albert (that isn't his true name) and say--