A Regimental Dinner ought to be described by some lady novelist who has never been to one and is in no way hampered by any unromantic facts. Grizzled men bearing the scars of old wounds should talk to each other of midnight marches and fierce charges and hand-to-hand combats, and tell the tale over their port of how Billy Bright Eyes, the curly-headed drummer of Company B, won the Victoria Cross on some day of awful slaughter. Unfortunately for picturesqueness' sake the grizzled men talk about nothing of the kind. The man who could narrate as moving stories as ever Othello dropped into Desdemona's willing ear tells his next-door neighbour of the fishing in Norway he has taken this year and of the advantages of travelling to it from the port in a motor car instead of going on the old country conveyances. The man who really earned a V.C. in South Africa, though there were no lookers-on to write glowing accounts to headquarters, is discussing with another man of many battles the advantages of Waterloo over other late-bearing strawberry plants, and laments that there are no pears this year on any of his trees. Tales of a big night at mess in "The Shiny," when a Highland regiment, passing through, was entertained at a dinner which only ended when the pipes were playing "Hey Johnnie Cope" in the grey before sunrise, may stray casually into the conversation, and a regretful word or two may be said that the regimental polo fund in India had not enough ready money to buy a certain pony which would just have won a match for the regiment in an important tournament. Cricket, polo, grouse moors, the coming hunting season, the present play at the Gaiety, the merits of the various revues are the things talked about, and "shop" is almost as rigidly excluded from the conversation as though the dinner was taking place in the regimental mess. The length of a regimental dinner is as difficult to curtail as is that of a City feast or a Masonic banquet, for any manager of a restaurant or any _maître d'hôtel_ considers it to be an "important" meal, and believes that the guests will not think they have dined satisfactorily unless they have eaten prodigiously. But the three officers who manage our Regimental Dinner Club are happily men of the world as well as old soldiers, and they insist that the dinner shall be ordered to please the tastes of those who dine, and not of those who serve the dinner. This is the menu of the Trocadero dinner. The little circle of beef offered to each man is the only heavy dish in it, and the chicken with its tempting stuffing is the only rich dish that it contains: