him largely but fearfully; and, were it not that he might take me for a waiter in disguise, I would also call him “Sir.” I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, _pari passu_ with the old gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, who might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an oleaginous undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary Festival of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second floor to the right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair-case, and whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, “Two storeys higher, sir.” A third waylays me benevolently on the first-floor landing, and mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return for which he gives me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket; which last is taken from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, the bows of whose cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread Presence—a stout, severe man with a gray head, who is in truth the head-waiter at this Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn ceremony inducts me into the reception-room. Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apartment, I find about fifty people I don’t know from Adam, and who are yet all brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my rubicund white-waistcoated friend. And, to tell the truth, I don’t know him personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumerable festivals, is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other fifty strangers. I have heard all their names, and all about them; but one is not expected to remember these things at public dinners. You take wine with your next neighbour; sometimes converse with him about eating and drinking, the merits of the charity, the late political tergiversation of the chairman, the heat of the weather, the fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the pretty face of Miss Ransford, and there an end. Your interlocutor may be to-morrow the lawyer who sues you, the author whose book you will slaughter in a review, the Commissioner of Insolvency who may send you back for eighteen months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about as valid a claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met him in the Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas Hotel at New York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it is not, I believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the gentleman who has been so frequently your fellow _convive_ a very distant bow should you meet him in the street; but even this is thought to be a freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum.