A basket of great chunks of household bread is on the white-clothed table at which you find a place; your chop, if you have selected a chop, will come to you on a willow-patterned dish, and you will transfer it to a willow-patterned plate. In old days all meat at Baker's used to be served on pewter. But if the four plates over the fireplace are the only survivors of the pewter set, your beer will be brought you in a pewter tankard, and most of the glass is of old pattern. When you come to the cheese stage your slice of Cheddar and pat of butter are both excellent. Indeed all the food at Baker's is good. No eating place which does not give good food at reasonable prices ever survives in the City, and Baker's has seen nearly three hundred years pass away. Who the original Baker was who gave his name to the chop-house no one knows, but a guess is made that he was a relation of that Mr Baker who was Master of Lloyd's Coffee-House in Lombard Street in 1740, and who carried to Sir Robert Walpole the news of Admiral Vernon's taking of Portobello, being suitably rewarded as a bringer of good tidings. The customers of Baker's Chop-house are excellent walking advertisements of the house. They all seem to be prosperous City men, young and old; they are well groomed and they look well-fed and contented. When you have finished your meal at Baker's you leave twopence by your plate as the waiter's tip, you give the grill-cook another penny, if you have eaten grilled fare, as you pass him on your way out, and then, pausing at the wicket of the counting-room, you recite to the lady who faces you the things you have eaten and what you have imbibed, and she, doing a sum of mental arithmetic, tells you instantly what you have to pay. As a souvenir of the house she will give you a post card, if you ask for it, carrying a miniature copy of the work of art over the fireplace. But there are chop-houses in London outside the City limits, and I know of three of them within arrow-flight of Piccadilly Circus. There is Snow's, for instance, in Sherwood Street, almost in the Circus. Snow's has a reputation for its steaks, and I know men who declare that the best bacon and eggs in the world are those brought in between two plates from the kitchen and placed on the tables at Snow's. It has lately been rebuilt, and is a modern reproduction of a Tudor house, its three little gables and the green gallery before its upper windows being very picturesque. The old tables and the old partitions are in their old places in the lower rooms, but the walls of glazed tiles and the curved brass hangings for coats and hats are scarcely Tudor. The company at Snow's at its busy times of the day is a curious mixture. Your neighbour at table may be a clergyman up from the country, or the man who shaves you at Shipwright's round the corner, or a young artist, or a taxi chauffeur.