A curious piece of furniture, glass above, wood below, caught my eye as we went into the room. It looked at a distance like a jeweller's showcase, and I asked my host if it was that. He laughed and told me to inspect the jewels that it contained. It was a sideboard for the cold meats, showing them, but at the same time keeping the dust from them. It is cooled by ice. It is such a happy idea that the Carlton Club has copied it. This is the menu of the lunch that I might have eaten in its entirety had I chosen: Consommé Pluche. Potage Solferino. Boiled Salmon, Caper Sauce. Fried Fresh Haddock. Omelette Alsacienne. Grilled Kidney, Vert Pré. Roast Haunch of Mutton, Red Currant Jelly. Roast Veal à l'Anglaise (Or choice of cold meats). Cabbage. Tomatoes. Boiled and Lyonnaise Potatoes. Roast Partridge and Chips. Damson Pudding. Baked Custard. Stewed Apricots. Cheese. Radishes. Watercress. I know of old that the cookery at the hotel is excellent, for I have often lunched both there and at the Abercorn Rooms, next door, so I did not feel in honour bound to form myself into a tasting committee of one, and to go through the menu. I ate salmon and partridge and damson pudding, and found them excellent. On the menu I saw that the price of the lunch was 3s. 6d. My host, being a Freemason of high degree, asked me if I had ever seen the Masonic temple in the Abercorn Rooms, and as I said that I had not we crossed on the first floor from the hotel to the rooms, and, meeting Mr Amendt, the manager of all the Great Eastern catering enterprises, on the way, he showed us the temple, splendid with panels of onyx and columns of delicately tinted marble, the lamps of onyx, dish-shaped and throwing their light up to the ceiling, seeming to me to be the most beautiful things of their kind I have ever seen in a temple. Mr Amendt, having his master key in his pocket, took us through many ante-rooms and small banqueting-rooms, with pictures by Lely of some of the beauties of Charles II.'s Court on the walls, and we looked in, on my way to the street, at the great Hamilton Hall, a replica of the banqueting-room of the Palais Soubise, where the waiters, lunch being finished, were putting the chairs upside down on the tables, and at the grill-room, named after the county of Norfolk, which, with its violet marble pilasters and its paintings of City celebrities--Nell Gwynne being cheek by jowl with such eminent respectabilities as Whittington and Gresham--is at night one of the pleasantest little banqueting-rooms in which I have ever feasted.