In the morning, Ray determined that he would not breakfast at the restaurant under the hotel, partly because he was ashamed to meet the people who, he knew, suspected him of trying to beat them out of the price of his supper, and partly because he had decided that it was patronized chiefly by the country merchants who frequented the hotel, and he wanted something that was more like New York. He had heard of those foreign eating-houses where you got a meal served in courses at a fixed price, and he wandered about looking for one. He meant to venture into the first he found, and on a side street he came on a hotel with a French name, and over the door in an arch of gilt letters the inscription, Restaurant Français. There was a large tub on each side of the door, with a small evergreen tree in it; some strings or wires ran from these tubs to the door-posts and sustained a trailing vine that formed a little bower on either hand; a Maltese cat in the attitude of a sphinx dozed in the thicket of foliage, and Ray’s heart glowed with a sense of the foreignness of the whole effect. He had never been abroad, but he had read of such things, and he found himself at home in an environment long familiar to his fancy. The difference of things was the source of his romance, as it is with all of us, and he looked in at the window of this French restaurant with the feelings he would have had in the presence of such a restaurant in Paris, and he began to imagine gay, light-minded pictures about it. At the same time, while he was figuring inside at one of the small tables, _vis-à-vis_ with a pretty actress whom he invented for the purpose, he was halting on the sidewalk outside, wondering whether he could get breakfast there so early as eight o’clock, and doubtful whether he should not betray his strangeness to New York hours if he tried. When he went in there was nobody there but one white-aproned waiter, who was taking down some chairs from the middle table where they had been stacked with their legs in the air while he was sweeping. But he did not disdain to come directly to Ray, where he had sat down, with a plate and napkin and knife and fork, and exchange a good-morning with him in arranging them before him. Then he brought half a yard of French bread and a tenuous, translucent pat of American butter; and asked Ray whether he would have chops or beefsteak with his coffee. The steak came with a sprig of water-cress on it, and the coffee in a pot; and the waiter, who had one eye that looked at Ray, and another of uncertain focus, poured out the coffee for him, and stood near, with a friendly countenance, and a cordial interest in the young fellow’s appetite. By this time a neat _dame de comptoir_, whom Ray knew for a _dame de comptoir_ at once, though he had never seen one before, took her place behind a little desk in the corner, and the day had begun for the Restaurant Français.