“The plates of the others were heaped upon. My time has come. There is my big dinner plate piled high with—what on earth! Birds! yes, tiny bits of birds, skylarks, kidneys, strips of beef, just smothered in pastry like sea-foam, and dark brown gravy, steaming with fragrance, as seasoning. “‘Half-and-half’—British bitter and stout in old-time pewter mugs was brought; out of deference to my sex, I suppose, a glass tumbler was placed before me, but I scorned to use it. Didn’t Thackeray say it was worth a year’s absence in far-away countries to realise the joy that filled one’s soul upon returning to old England and quaffing her bitter from a pewter mug? “Then came stewed cheese, on the thin shaving of crisp, golden toast in hot silver saucers—so hot that the cheese was of the substance of thick cream, the flavour of purple pansies and red raspberries commingled. “There were only 400 skylarks put into the pudding made for the Prince of Wales at the banquet of the Forth Bridge opening in Edinburgh. How many thousands of the ‘blithe spirits’ have been put into the Cheshire Cheese pudding for 200 years? “Shades of Shelley and Keats!” In _Society_ a series of articles was devoted to the description of famous restaurants and of the fare to be enjoyed within their walls. The writer, long an intimate of the “Cheese,” devotes not the least piquant of his descriptions to that immortal house. He writes: “Christopher North chopped here, and has recorded his high opinion of its kitchen and its cellar. I fancy, however, that it was about the early _Punch_ period that its real connection with journalism was ratified and the union consummated. Shirley Brooks has written pleasantly about it, Albert Smith has chaffed it, Edmund Yates has embalmed it in his ‘Reminiscences,’ and I have always had an idea that the Fleet Street chop-house in which poor Sydney Carton is found sitting in a semi-drunken condition is the Cheshire Cheese. Dickens, at all events, knew this place well, nor was it likely to escape a use of this sort. Mr. George Augustus Sala was a constant customer.”