Then I asked Jones minor what he thought of it all, and he said that he thought it jolly good. I paid my bill: Two dinners, £1, 1s.; _table d'hôte_ wine, 7s. 6d.; half 277, 7s.; liqueur, 2s. 6d.; total, £1, 18s.; and asked Jones minor where he would like to go and be amused. He said he had heard that the Empire was jolly good. XXI IN THE SHADOW OF THE PALACE THEATRE KETTNER'S LE DINER FRANÇAIS I know as a result of my early training in Miss Woodman's school for the "sons of the nobility and gentry" in Somerset Street, off Orchard Street, that a piece of land almost entirely surrounded by water is called a peninsula. But I was never instructed in any school as to there being a special name for a theatre almost entirely surrounded by restaurants. If there is such a name it should be applied to the Palace Theatre, for restaurants have sprouted up about it just as grass grows round the foot of a tree. Of this group of restaurants two at least that I know deserve special mention, one as having been the pioneer of clean restaurant kitchens and the other, a very cheap restaurant, as having made the fortune of one restaurateur and of being in the course of making the fortune of his successor. Kettner's, in Church Street, was the first small restaurant that dared to show its kitchen to all comers at a time when the kitchens of most little foreign restaurants were places of horror. M. Auguste Kettner was a chef who had learned his art in his native country, and who, as an investment of his savings, started a small restaurant, in 1867, in Church Street, Soho. Those were the days before Shaftesbury Avenue was driven through the slums, before Cambridge Circus was made, before the Palace Theatre was built, and when Soho was a maze of little streets. So puzzling to a stranger was its geography that the district inspired W. S. Gilbert to write a "Bab" ballad concerning Peter the Wag, the policeman with a taste for practical jokes who always sent the people who asked the way of him in the wrong direction. Retribution came to Peter when he lost his way near Poland Street, Soho. "For weeks he trod his self-made beat, Through Newport--Gerrard--Bear--Greek--Rupert--Frith--Dean--Poland Streets, And into Golden Square."