and ‘rack,’ by which is meant gin; and, in the winter-time, of Irish stew and rump-steak pudding, glorious and grateful to every sense? To be compelled to run to and fro with these succulent viands from noon to late at night, without being able to spare time to consume them in comfort—where do waiters dine, and when, and how?—to be continually taking other people’s money only for the purpose of handing it to other people—are not these grievances sufficient to cross-grain the temper of the mildest-mannered waiter? Somebody is always in a passion at the ‘Cheese’: either a customer because there is not fat enough on his ‘point’ steak, or because there is too much bone in his mutton-chop; or else the waiter is wroth with the cook; or the landlord with the waiter, or the barmaid with all. Yes, there is a barmaid at the ‘Cheese,’ mewed up in a box not much bigger than a bird-cage, surrounded by groves of lemons, ‘ones’ of cheese, punch-bowls, and cruets of mushroom-catsup. I should not care to dispute with her, lest she should quoit me over the head with a punch-ladle, having a William-the-Third guinea soldered in the bowl.” “Old and New London,” ch. 10, part iii., p. 123, contains this paragraph:— “Mr. William Sawyer[5] has also written a very admirable sketch of the ‘Cheese’ and its old-fashioned conservative ways, which we cannot resist quoting:— “‘We are a close, conservative, inflexible body—we, the regular frequenters of the “Cheshire,”’ says Mr. Sawyer. ‘No new-fangled notions, new usages, new customs, or new customers for us. We have our history, our traditions, and our observations, all sacred and inviolable. Look around! There is nothing new, gaudy, flippant, or effeminately luxurious here. A small room, with heavily timbered windows, a low-planked ceiling. A huge projecting fireplace, with a great copper boiler always on the simmer, the sight of which might have roused even old John Willett, of the “Maypole,” to admiration. High, stiff-backed, inflexible “settees,” hard and grainy in texture, box off the guests half a dozen each to a table. Sawdust covers the floor, giving forth that peculiar faint odour which the French avoid by the use of the vine sawdust with its pleasant aroma. A chief ornament in which we indulge is a picture over the mantel-piece, a full-length of a now departed waiter, whom, in the long past, we caused to be painted, by subscription of the whole room, to commemorate his virtues, and our esteem. We sit bolt upright round our tables, waiting, but not impatient. A time-honoured solemnity is about to be observed, and we, the old stagers, is it for us to precipitate it? There are men in the room who have dined here every day for a quarter of a century—aye, the whisper goes round that one man did it on his wedding day! In all that time the more staid and well-regulated among us have observed a steady regularity of feeding. Five days in the week we have “Rotherham steak”—that mystery of