“There was on one of these many omnibuses a gentleman who tell me where in London I shall obtain a genuine coffee. Probably you know it is at this Vienna Café, in Holeborne. You do not know this place? _Strange._ It is quite near to you all the time. Almost at your British Museum. Ah; this gentleman has told me too a most funny story of a German who go there proudly talking English. He was waiting; ach they are very slow in this place, and at last he shouts for everyone to hear, Vaiter! Venn shall I become a cup of coffee?” Miriam laughed her delight apprehensively. “Ah, I like very much these stories,” he was saying, his eyes dreamily absent, she feared, on a memory-vista of similar anecdotes. But in a moment he was alive again in his adventure. “It was at London Bridge. I have come all the way, walkingly, to this Café. It is a strange place. Really glahnend; Viennese; very dirrty. But coffee most excellent; just as on the Continent. You shall go there; you will see. Upstairs it is most dreadful. More dirrty; and in an intense gloom of smoke, very many men, ah they are dreadful, I could not describe to you. Like monkeys; but all in Schach-parteis. That shall be very good for me. I am most enthusiastic with this game since a boy.” “Billiards?” Why should he look so astonished and impatiently explain so reproachfully and indulgently? She grasped the meaning of the movements of his hands. He was a chess-player “a game much older--uralt--and the most mental, the only true abstractive game.” How differently an English chess-player would have spoken. She regarded his eager contained liveliness. Russian chess players remained alive. Was chess mental? Pure tactics. Should she declare that chess was a dreadful boring indulgence, leading nowhere? Perhaps he would be able to show her that this was not so.... Why do the Germans call two people playing chess a chess-party? “I have met there a man, a Polish doctor. We have made party and have play until the Café close, when we go to his room and continue there to play till the morning. Ah, it was most-beautiful.” “Had you met him before?” “Oh no. He is in London; stewdye-ink medicine.”