At four, exactly, returned Diggory to his inn, having despatched considerable business for a mere beginner, and entered the "Commercial Room." A buzz and a general whisper went round, as he entered, and no one returned his courteous movement (for he followed his book) when he performed it! The company was large, well-dressed, and from the "bang-up" appearance of the numerous leather portmanteaus under the side-tables in the room, and the dashing whips and proud cloaks on the hooks, Diggory was sure they were, indeed, what the cockney would call "highly respectable" commercial gentlemen, or "gentlemen on the road." It was strange, he thought, that they should be so uncourteous. Yet, Diggory observed, that every new comer was received in the same way; and so he set it down in his memory that it was the wrong time of the day for bows of courtesy among "commercial gentlemen;"--and that was not a bad idea, either, for so green an observer,--especially as the gentlemen had not dined. Dinner was brought in, and a tolerably sumptuous affair it was. "Commercial gentlemen," even at the "first-rate commercial inns," don't "cut it quite so fat" (for so vulgar a phrase may be allowed since it will apply to the dinners) now-a-days, as they did then,--since we are speaking of something more than twenty years bygone; and the last twenty years, with their wonderful innovations of railway travelling and increased competition, have made woeful alterations among your princely commercial travellers: they were the innkeeper's grandees then: the case is altered now. Diggory, with all his intellectuality and sentimentalism and so forth, was pleased to see the goodly provisions of the table, for he was very hungry; and he began to muster up his recollections of "the book of etiquette."