The mid-day breakfast at a factory is usually one of the most pleasant hours of the day. The friends who are staying in the house, for planters are very hospitable, and any neighbours (neighbours meaning people living within twenty miles) who have come over for a morning visit, all present themselves at the well-decked table. It is hardly necessary to say that breakfast at 12 o’clock indicates that there is to be no lunch at 1 or 2 o’clock, and it is, in fact, breakfast and lunch combined. Therefore, the dishes are both numerous and serious; and as the sun is over the yard-arm, in nautical phrase, the men have fully earned their right to a draught of cool beer, or of claret or hock with such combinations of soda and iced materials as the heart desires. When a man has been in the saddle for several hours with a fine blazing sun overhead, and the temperature almost beyond the thermometer’s power of measurement, it is not astonishing that a good pull at a tankard of beer is something like a fabulous draught of nectar. It is a sort of medical axiom that as long as a man can take plenty of outdoor exercise in India, he can drink as much beer as is good for him; and _vice versâ_, if he wishes to drink beer he must be careful to take plenty of exercise. But to some constitutions beer is always hostile, and so they must have recourse to claret, or hock, or burgundy; or it may be brandy and soda, but this is always to be shunned as much as possible. However, breakfast must come to an end; and when the ladies of the house retire to the drawing-room, the men usually take their arm-chairs and a pipe, and not unfrequently the conversation gradually drops, until they have all quietly passed off into a gentle doze, which is nature’s best restorer at this hour of the day.