An American tavern-dinner, during the sitting of the circuit, is every way worthy of a minute and graphic description; but our limits will hardly admit of our assuming the task. If “misery makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows,” so does the law. Judges, advocates, witnesses, sheriffs, clerks, constables, and not unfrequently the accused, dine in common, with rail-road speed. The rattling of knives, forks, and spoons, the clatter of plates, the rushing of waiters, landlord, landlady, chamber-maids, ostler and bar-keeper included, produce a confusion that would do honour to the most profound “republican simplicity.” Everything approaches a state of nature but the eatables; and they are invariably overdone. On an evil day, some Yankee invented an article termed a “cooking-stove;” and since its appearance everything like good cookery has vanished from the common American table. There is plenty spoiled; abundance abused. Of made dishes, with the exception of two or three of very simple characters, there never were any; and these have been burned to cinders by the baking processes of the “cook-stoves.” It matters little, however, to the _convives_ of a circuit-court dinner, what the dishes are called, or of what they are composed. “Haste” forbids “taste;” and it actually occurred that day, as it occurs almost invariably on such occasions, that a very clever country practitioner was asked the _materiel_ of the dish he had been eating, and he could not tell it! Talk of the mysteries of French cookery! The “cook-stove” produces more mystery than all the art of all the culinary artists of Paris; and this, too, on a principle that tallies admirably with that of the purest “republican simplicity;” since it causes all things to taste alike. To a dinner of this stamp Dunscomb now sat down, just ten minutes after the first clatter of a plate was heard, and just as the only remove was seen, in the form of slices of pie, pudding and cake. With his habits, railroad speed or lightning-line eating could find no favour; and he and Jack got their dinner, as best they might, amid the confusion and remnants of the close of such a repast. Nine-tenths of those who had so lately been at work as trencher-men were now picking their teeth, smoking segars, or preparing fresh quids for the afternoon. A few clients were already holding their lawyers by the button; and here and there one of the latter led the way to his room to “settle” some slander cause in which the plaintiff had got frightened.