It always contains a number of tables, which accommodate not less than half a dozen persons; small tables of the proper dimensions for a _tête-â-tête_ being, for inscrutable reasons, wholly absent from English eating-houses. The grill-room in question is decorated in that style of which the animus is to be agreeable to Mr. William Morris, though I suspect that in the present application of his charming principles he would find a good deal of base alloy. At any rate, the apartment contains a number of large medallions in blue pottery, pieced together, representing the heathen gods and goddesses, whose names are inscribed in crooked letters in an unexpected part of the picture. This is quite the thing that one would expect to find in one of those cloisters or pleasances, or "pleached gardens," in which Mr. Morris's Gothic heroines drag their embroidered petticoats up and down, as slow-pacedly as their poet sings. Only, in these pretty, dilettantish cloisters there would probably be no large tickets suspended alongside of the pictorial pottery, inscribed with the monstrous words, _Tripe! Suppers!_ This is one of those queer eruptions of plainness and homeliness which one encounters at every turn in the midst of the massive luxury and general expensiveness of England--like the big, staring announcement, _Beds_, in the coffee-house windows, or _Well-aired Beds_ painted on the side walls of taverns; or like a list of labels which I noticed the other day on a series of japanned boxes in a pastry-cook's shop. They seemed to me so characteristic that I made a note of them. The reason of my being in the pastry-cook's shop was my having contracted in Paris the harmless habit of resorting to one of these establishments at the luncheon hour, for the purpose of consuming a little _gateau_. Resuming this innocent practice on English soil, I found it attended with serious difficulties--the chief of which was that there were no _gateaux_ to consume. An appreciative memory of those brightly mirrored little shops on the Paris boulevards, in which tender little tarts, in bewildering variety, are dispensed to you by a neat-waisted _patissière_, cast a dusky shadow over the big buns and "digestive biscuits" which adorn the counter of an English bakery. But it takes a good while to eat a bun, and while you stand there solemnly disintegrating your own, you may look about you in search of the characteristic. In Paris the pastry-cooks' shops are, as the French say, coquettish--as coquettish as the elegant simplicity of plate glass, discreet gilding, polished brass, and a demonstrative _dame de comptoir_ can make them. In London they are not coquettish--witness the grim nomenclature alluded to above; it was distributed over a series of green tin cases, ranged behind the counters: Tops and bottoms--royal digestives--arrow-root--oat-cake--rice biscuit--ratafias.