Chapter III (2)

Then his idle glance fell on two persons with a suddenly awakened interest. The chef appeared for a moment at an opening in the shrubbery, and then was to be discerned strolling down a sequestered path in the direction of a kitchen-garden, where he finally paused and became absorbed in the contemplation of various hot-beds. The mighty artist possessed the beauty so largely bestowed by capricious Nature on his class in France and Italy. His bearing was dignified, his features perfect, his form as finely proportioned as that of the classical athlete; a silky black moustache drooped to his firm chin; his eye was large, tranquil and lustrous, reflecting all things and revealing nothing. He wore his linen cap and apron with grace, and his feet were encased in slippers of green carpet.

"He must be the head-cook of whom madame is so proud," murmured Mr. Nibby. "I have half a mind to call him and inquire of him if he could make me some honest gruel of Indian meal, well salted."

The second person was no other than Fräulein Rottenhöfer, her blond hair smoothed and her outward aspect composed.

"Why, that is the very girl I helped on the Cologne boat!" exclaimed Mr. Nibby with reviving animation as he put on his eye-glass.

What a light figure had the Fräulein in a blue muslin gown, with a black velvet ribbon about her throat! How pretty the sunshine rendered those fair tresses, piled high over a cushion on the top of her head, which left the low, broad forehead and round face fully revealed! She walked rapidly toward the hot-beds, where the chef lingered with a sprig of parsley in his hand. That celebrated artist, although absorbed in a professional reverie over certain herbs, became aware of the approach of maidenly charms and doffed his cap.

The Fräulein disliked excessively the task assigned her. She was a gentlewoman by birth, shy, sensitive and proud, now dependent for bread on the whims of that wicked old woman, the baroness. The latter had said on this particular morning, as she sat up in bed to sip her chocolate, looking like a witch, "Fräulein Rottenhöfer, you will have the kindness to present my compliments to the chef of this hotel, and tell him I approve of his hare ragoût. He may serve it more frequently for my déjeuner."

The Fräulein had flushed uneasily, and murmured, "Perhaps Fritz or Margret could do it better."

Whereupon the baroness, who seemed to exist solely for the pleasure of tormenting those dependent on her caprices, had rolled one black eye at the young girl and rejoined, "You will do it personally, and to-day, understand. Tut! doubtless you often gossip with the chef."

The Fräulein winced and compressed her lips. She, a born gentlewoman reduced to distressing poverty, was accused of gossiping with the hotel chef, like any other servant! However, she had watched her opportunity, dreading exceedingly to seek the kitchens, and Fate had sent him out to the hot-beds in order to be waylaid. She made her little speech concerning the ragoût, and the chef laid his hand on his heart, declaring that the lady baroness was too kind in praising his poor efforts. Then, as the Fräulein was about to turn away, a softer expression beamed from his fine, dark eyes, the tones of his voice acquired the caressing intonation of Southern races, and this knight of the copper stew-pan desired to know if mademoiselle herself had a penchant for any particular dish. She was young, pretty and amiable, ready to smile if the baroness would only permit, as she did now while assuring the chef that _all_ his efforts pleased her. She tripped back to the hotel, having accomplished the mission, and met full shock the spectacled glance of Mr. Nibby as he stood in the window, eye-glass on nose and Oriental dressing-gown glowing like the plumage of a tropical bird. The Fräulein blushed, hesitated, walked on a pace, and paused, evidently recognizing him.

"I hope you are better to-day," she said in careful English, then vanished quickly through the door.

Mr. Nibby was profoundly interested. He forgot how he felt for ten minutes at least. This was the very girl he had assisted on the Cologne boat in the autumn. The service rendered was a trifling one: her pocket had been picked coming on board the steamer; she was alone and frightened; evidently the official was sceptical as to her story, when Mr. Nibby stepped in opportunely, paid for another ticket and took the young girl under his own protection to the extent of frowning upon the advances of certain other tourists of a pronounced type. She had explained with simplicity and dignity of manner that she was journeying to Bonn for the purpose of applying to a great lady for the position of companion, and had only just quitted the school where she was educated. Then she had gone ashore at Bonn with shyly-expressed thanks, and Mr. Nibby, good Samaritan by the way, had been swept on by the Rhine to distant Mayence. Here she was again, at Mentone, tripping through that tropical garden with its palms, oranges, and mantling heliotrope, with the sunshine playing over her blond hair and fair face, the blue muslin robe a bright and charming element of color.

The garçon appeared with Mr. Nibby's déjeuner as he turned away from the window.

"Salad? No, I detest the sight and smell of oil," said Mr. Nibby pettishly in response to an inquiry: then he added, in gloomy soliloquy, "I wish there was not such an article as a beefsteak in the world."

The garçon stared at Mr. Nibby sympathetically. He was a chuckle-headed youth in a black coat with tails that threatened to sweep the ground, and a white cravat of stiffest quality and enormous dimensions. It might have wrung the chef's heart to have beheld Mr. Nibby turn over his dainty beefsteak with a fork and sniff at it disdainfully, but he was fortunately spared that spectacle. Mr. Nibby, in his truly alarming state of health, was restricted by his physician to the simplest diet: thus the chef's beefsteak had become the bane of his existence. He was like the needy adventurer who subsisted on pigeons for a month to win a wager, or the prisoner who starved on chocolate. He lost no time in making inquiries about the Fräulein Rottenhöfer, and the sympathetic garçon, although still a fledgling in years and with a down on his upper lip like that on a gosling's back, immediately saw his way clearly to fresh perquisites of office. If Mr. Nibby, occupant of the best suite of rooms in the hotel, was interested in a lady, any stray news concerning her fetched by himself would naturally result in francs. There was an abundance to impart at the outset. Mr. Nibby, kind of heart, left the detested beefsteak to grow cold while he listened, although that sacrifice was not a great one.

The Baroness von Merk was very old and paralytic, and possessed a fearful temper. The sympathetic garçon drew the cork of a wine-bottle, and opined that she was mad. She had been a celebrated court beauty in one of the German principalities, perhaps married with the left hand by the duke, and still retained fantastic caprices as the dregs in her spent cup of pleasure. Her own relatives had been driven away by her evil and malicious tongue. Her servants lived in purgatory, but then they received good wages, the garçon affirmed solemnly as he removed the cover of a potato-dish. What would monsieur think of her slapping the Fräulein with a fan for not reading distinctly or for not retrimming a lace mantle to please such a whimsical mistress? Old Margret, the lady's-maid, was kept awake night after night to watch beside the baroness's couch when she was nervous and feared the ghosts of her own past. Fritz was the gray-haired person in livery, who had served too long to permit his own digestion to be disturbed.

"The women cry, but I do not. I have lived with her forty years," Fritz observed in those kitchen regions where the faults of the great are freely criticised, with a gesture toward his cheeks, in texture like parchment.

When Mr. Nibby heard this sad tale of petty tyranny his sympathies were moved. He had bought a fresh ticket on the Cologne boat which consigned the Fräulein to the tender mercies of the baroness. He began to experience a degree of personal responsibility in the whole matter. How could he help the girl out of her painful position now?

"Dear me!" ejaculated Mr. Nibby, pushing aside the untasted beefsteak, and the garçon subsequently devoured it by stealth, seated on the back stairs with a tray balanced precariously on his knees.

Our invalid continued to say "Dear me!" during his afternoon drive, and on returning to the hotel either the lack of that matutinal beefsteak or interest in the Fräulein Rottenhöfer induced him to announce that he would dine at the _table d'hôte_. What need to add that the sympathetic garçon placed him beside the Fräulein, who appeared slightly startled at first, and then pleased? When the companion had begged to be spared the ordeal of eating alone at the table d'hôte, the baroness had insisted on compliance: her _dame de compagnie_ always dined at the table d'hôte. Good often results from evil in this world.

Mr. Nibby enjoyed the meal amazingly. The _salle-à-manger_ was decked with flowers, the table linen was snowy white, the plate glittered, and there was as a central ornament a mediæval castle of spun sugar perched on almond rocks, which must have cost the chef much time to design. It was the fête of madame's patron saint, and the church-bells which had resounded in the town since dawn meant also a dinner of unusual elegance at the Hôtel des Jasmins, concluded by champagne of inferior quality, but freely dispensed to all. The saint had brought her very good luck, madame piously observed. Thus the meal was a sort of feast to Mr. Nibby and the Fräulein. Both remembered the Cologne boat, and she required no other incentive than gratitude to prompt inquiry as to her benefactor's health. There are more unfavorable places for growth of mutual confidence than a table d'hôte. Amidst a hum of voices and clatter of dishes, with many lights twinkling before his dazzled eyes, Mr. Nibby became aware that the Fräulein had an aunt living in America, whom she desired to visit, although her ideas of distance were of the vaguest. Poor Fräulein! belonging to that vast army of educated women teeming in every land and needing to coin money out of their accomplishments, she must wait on the whimsical old baroness a while longer before making a journey to distant America.

In turn, she learned that Mr. Nibby had long promised himself the recreation of foreign travel, and had now escaped from active business-life for the realization. Alas! his health had improved in England only to suffer severely on the Continent, especially in the Hôtel des Jasmins.

"Perhaps the climate is too warm for you," she said, looking at him with mild blue eyes.

Thus the banquet concluded. Mr. Nibby was quite animated in manner, while the Fräulein was all the prettier for the additional color in her cheeks induced by a little excitement. The sympathetic garçon with the long coat-tails grinned at a sideboard where he was clashing about knives and forks. Mr. Nibby retired, carrying away the image of his fair neighbor for evening reverie over his cigar, and that night he slept so soundly, without recurrence of his afflicting nausea, that he was disposed to make of madame's saint's day one of most favorable augury for himself.

The Fräulein went up stairs, and read aloud to the baroness. Her thoughts strayed to the good-looking gentleman with a gray moustache, friendly smile and well-kept, white hands who had been so kind to her. At ten o'clock she received an unexpected gift. Lo! on the fête-day the chef had compounded for her a second edifice in the shape of a nougat house stocked with bonbons. She blushed, then laughed like a child.

* * * * *

A month later, the Fräulein again sat reading to the baroness, her thoughts astray and her tone of voice so monotonous that it acted soporifically on her listener. The baroness nodded in her arm-chair, with her pet poodle on her knee. The coquettish cap on her head was grotesquely crumpled, and her false front pushed awry, while the sneer on her pinched features only deepened their habitual expression of ill-nature in repose. The fat poodle blinked and the Fräulein yawned. In the large, gloomy house at Bonn was a florid portrait of the shrivelled old creature before her, there represented in slim youth, in blue velvet, with state jewels clasped about her throat. Outside, the garden still glowed with vivid patches of flowers, but the sky was dull and the piercing mistral swept clouds of dust over the boundary-wall occasionally. Again did the chef stroll down that remote path in the shrubbery, where the boundary of his dominions seemed marked by the forcing-beds of the kitchen-garden.

The Fräulein's eyes sparkled with a sudden determination. She closed her book softly and glanced apprehensively at the slumbering baroness. The poodle winked one eye at her, as if perfectly comprehending the situation, and laid its nose on two little folded paws. Then she slipped noiselessly out of the room, ran down stairs, and met Mr. Nibby in the hall. He looked very ill, and shook his head in response to her inquiry concerning his health. Mr. Nibby's health could scarcely be worse, and yet he lingered at the Hôtel des Jasmins, where he constantly met Fräulein Rottenhöfer. Sympathy is the first requisite of the human heart. Such sympathy as the young German lady had unexpectedly required of the American tourist on the Cologne boat she was striving to return in another fashion.

"I have a thought," she exclaimed with unusual animation of manner as she now encountered the invalid. "Will you be so kind to come in ze pavilion while I talk with ze chef?"

Mr. Nibby, rather puzzled, slid into the pavilion, and the Fräulein paused in the path beyond to accost her unconscious victim. Through the mantling vines Mr. Nibby could witness the smiles this really ingenuous young creature was prepared to lavish on the susceptible chef because already aware of her power. The Fräulein's tongue ran nimbly enough in French. It was now the turn of beefsteak to be praised. Did the baroness like his beefsteak then? the chef inquired, hand on heart, large eyes darting admiring glances, and yet with a wholly inscrutable smile. The Fräulein colored slightly: her gaze sought the ground. Unquestionably, the baroness approved. The dish was always most skilfully cooked, the gravy exquisitely flavored, and the meat fibre possessed the tenderness of game, the Fräulein said. The chef, always with a sprig of parsley twirling between his fingers to assist conversation, confessed modestly that there was skill in his treatment of the prosaic beefsteak.

Mr. Nibby listened, fascinated, and with a dawning suspicion in his mind. What was the Fräulein striving to accomplish? Actually, this daughter of Eve was begging to be instructed in the preparation of the culinary triumph. Perhaps she had never received before such a tribute to her charms as when the chef, rolling his fine eyes languishingly, confessed himself to be wax in her hands, and ready to yield up one of the secrets of his profession without the bribe of gold. The steak need not be the best quality of beef: even a tough and inferior portion would serve. The chef approached nearer his questioner while vouchsafing this explanation, and lowered his voice mysteriously. The Fräulein winced, but stood her ground. Ah, that was much to know, she assented with a bright smile, if one should be required to cook for an invalid. The chef nodded sagely. The steak must be laid in oil for twelve hours, which made it deliciously tender, then removed, dried slightly, and broiled. He never cooked with oil for foreigners, he added with scarcely veiled contempt of tone.

Mr. Nibby groaned in the summer-house. What! the chef's beefsteak was prepared in oil, and he had been born with such an antipathy to the luxury that it made him uncomfortable to sit at table opposite a castor! Could his daily illness be attributed to the simple diet selected in the belief that a beefsteak was the most harmless food for a dyspeptic?

The Fräulein returned to him radiant with success. "I have thought it must be what you eat," she exclaimed.

"How clever women are!" said Mr. Nibby fervently. "You always jump at conclusions, and now I am placed under an everlasting obligation."

"Then I am glad," she answered simply.

Mr. Nibby took her hand and kissed it. "Would you like to visit your aunt in America?" he inquired tenderly.

The mistral blew and the sky was gray. Up in her salon the baroness had awakened, and the poodle on her knee not only winked one eye, but cocked an ear apprehensively.

"Continue the reading: I am not asleep," croaked the old lady.

No response. Then the baroness opened her eyes wide, and they flashed ominously. Never had Fräulein Rottenhöfer dared to quit her seat before. The crash of an overturned chair succeeded the peal of a bell pulled by a tremulous hand, and then there was a stifled scream.

When the Fräulein came up stairs later in guilty haste, she paused to fasten an exquisite rose, gift of Mr. Nibby, in her dress, and the flower rivalled only the fine color of her own cheeks.

The baroness lay on the floor, stiff and rigid, with old Margret wringing her hands helplessly, and old Fritz looking on with solemnity. For the first time on record these two faithful retainers dared to express a candid opinion in her presence. "It's another stroke," said Fritz. "See to what a pass you have brought yourself by temper, mistress!"

"You could not walk alone," moaned Margret.

The baroness, dumb as if her features were frozen in a mask, lay in impotent and awful silence, staring back at them.

That night Mr. Nibby formed two resolutions: one was to ask the Fräulein Rottenhöfer to marry him, and the other never to eat another of the chef's beefsteaks.

In the garden of the Hôtel des Jasmins the flowers still bloom, the palms rustle and the orange trees change their snowy blossoms to balls of gold. Madame has occasion to be dissatisfied with her celebrated artist of the kitchen. He seasons his sauces savagely with excess of fiery condiments; there is no nice discrimination exercised in his vols-au-vent; the treatment of his entrées is commonplace, not to say coarse; he has been known to burn the soup hopelessly. He no longer seeks the garden in a leisure hour of the morning, but may be seen in the twilight standing with his back to the wall, smoking a cheap cigar and staring moodily at the windows once occupied by the pretty Fräulein. He sighs profoundly.

The Baroness von Merk has been carried back to her home on the Rhine by the faithful Fritz, a helpless burden, to be disposed of according to the judgment of others. What the air-castles of the chef might have been, built out of such rainbows as the Fräulein's smiles and praises, must ever remain buried in his own bosom. Ladies have been known to condescend to those of low estate before, especially when such personal beauty as his own manly perfections were in the balance. Did the chef dream of a rival Hôtel des Jasmins, with the Fräulein as attractive landlady, while he managed the whole establishment?

Alas, poor chef! left to sigh in the shadowy garden, while a most blooming bride crosses the Atlantic with fortunate bridegroom Mr. Nibby, miraculously restored in health and spirits. The first-cabin passengers are puzzled at table by the archness with which Mrs. Nibby proffers beefsteak to her husband, and his shudder of aversion as he rejects the dish.

If it is true that one man's meat is another man's poison, may not unconscious Mr. Nibby be deemed quits with the disconsolate chef in bearing away Fräulein Rottenhöfer as his wife?

VIRGINIA W. JOHNSON.

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER.

I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore, taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this dishonorable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of it. I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it--that I had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along the empty vista of the Drive in Hyde Park, have beheld, for almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis--either on the first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with the members of Parliament, or on the fifteenth when the grouse-shooting began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the departure of everything genteel, and the four millions of persons who remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having remained in town, I have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and steal abroad only under cover of the darkness--a line of conduct imposed by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed always had a theory that few things could be more pleasant than during the hot weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to one's self. If it were necessary, I could point with some exultation to the fact that I have never come so near as on the present occasion to an opportunity of testing my theory; and I must add that I have now tested it under circumstances which have deprived the experiment of half of its value.

To make it perfect, the summer should be very hot and the house in which you live very cool. You should keep it cool by keeping it dark--just dark enough not to prevent you from reading a charming old book as you lie on the sofa in one of the lighter rooms. Your costume as you lie on the sofa and wander about from chamber to chamber should be of the most imponderable; in fact, you should have on almost no clothes at all. To increase the comfort of your undressedness you must have no fellow-inmates but the servants, who remain below stairs and adapt themselves to the temperature as best they can. They are free, of course, to sit in the cellar. And then you must have several other resources--resources which, if you are an American, you may be pardoned for believing to be most easily secured in the case of your trying your experiment in your native land. The carpets must all have been taken up and the floors covered with straw matting in pale, tender colors. There must be an everlasting gush of the coldest water into a bath big enough for you, if the fancy takes you, to drown yourself in. You must have plenty of peaches and pears, of grapes and melons. You must commit unseen excesses in the consumption of ice-cream. You must sit in the evening on a balcony and, looking up and down the empty street, see here and there in other balconies the gleam of a white robe in the darkness.

These harmless conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best (or the worst) the highest flights of the thermometer in the British Islands are not particularly startling. People live with closed windows in August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a more obvious ornament of the market at mid-summer than at Christmas. This matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as "English comfort"--is a distinctly limited and restricted, an essentially private, affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English "fruit" as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone of contemptuous generalization by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen. They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and after a long delay, reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only "fruit" that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote seemed disposed to generalize: this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that in Devonshire, in Warwickshire, in Norfolk, in Dorset and in twenty other English counties whose names they had certainly heard, the most beautiful peaches and melons might be seen growing in considerable numbers in the most admirably organized hot-houses in the depths of the most extensive and picturesque properties. My auditors tossed their heads, of course, at the counties, the peaches and melons, the admirable hot-houses and the extensive properties; and indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to Buckingham Palace these reflections were but scantily consoling. But these are the things they have had in mind, the reasonable English people whom in other countries I have heard upholding the superiority of English fruit. I have heard them argue the case most resolutely against Frenchmen and Americans, but, in reality, the contending parties were talking about two very different things. One side was talking about fruit as a luxury, and the other about fruit as a necessity. The Englishman was thinking of the soft-colored, smooth-skinned peaches that he had been invited down into Dorsetshire to eat at eight o'clock in the evening at a brilliantly-lighted table: the American and the Frenchman were thinking of these articles as they importuned you from heaped-up fruit stalls in your daily walk. The difference brings me back to what I referred to as the "private" character of this particular branch of English comfort. A stranger may spend a summer in London and never be reminded of the existence of pears and grapes. Those establishments known in America as fruit-stalls are conspicuous by their absence, and their office is in no appreciable degree supplied by the inns, the restaurants or the clubs. I believe there are peaches of great rotundity to be obtained at Covent Garden market at half a crown apiece, but Covent Garden is hardly on the line of one's daily strolls. The irritated stranger, therefore, sitting down to gooseberries at a "palace" hotel, may be pardoned for unflattering generalizations. He gradually learns, if he remains in England, that the relation of hotels and restaurants to the life of the country is here essentially different from what it is elsewhere. It may be said, generally, that such places, at their best, represent the maximum comfort of the community. The traveller in England must teach himself that they represent the minimum, and he must learn the further lesson that "English comfort"--the comfort which, as I said just now, is known and venerated all over the world--means, strictly, the maximum comfort, the privilege, of a small minority, of the opulent and luxurious class. To make good inns and good restaurants there must be a comfortable _bourgeoisie_, for people of great fortune are able to do things in a way that makes them independent of a public fund of entertainment.

It is to this public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But one's liking for London--a stranger's liking at least--is at the best an anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly more difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest, entertainment and delight: what I mean is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusty, fierce and unbeautiful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at least with a kind of grudging satisfaction, and finds something warm and comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its heavy pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that every one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing. If it has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither the seat, the ice nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to your profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of these delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is idle--every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are too genteel, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own: they have those special resources which I mentioned a while since. They are always rich, and are naturally independent of communistic pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your _café noir_ handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and encamp for the evening under a row of colored lamps upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess live on a single floor up several pairs of stairs. They are, however, I think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how serious a danger it appears. It is not of the fear of contact with the great herd of one's unknown fellow-citizens that I speak: it is of the possibility of meeting individuals with whom in the business of life one has had some sort of formal relations--one's grocer, one's bootmaker, one's apothecary, even one's solicitor. To an American, a Frenchman, an Italian, there is of necessity nothing alarming in such an incident: there is at the worst a way of taking it easily. But as it looms up before an Englishman it has the power of making him extremely uncomfortable; and, combined with a corresponding anxiety on the part of the inferior himself, this prospective discomfort operates as a chronically deterrent force. These, however, are mysteries which I should not have allowed myself to deal with so parenthetically. I have ventured to do so because there is a very familiar illustration of the phenomenon I speak of. It may be found in the usual demeanor of English servants. If you "meet" an English servant--that is, if you encounter him at a moment when he is not literally executing an order for you--if you are left in a room with him, if you pass him in the hall, if you are confronted with him in the portico, you perceive that his effort is immediately to spare you a possibly offensive realization of his presence. He has been taught that at such times he is uncomfortable to you--that you don't, mentally as it were, know what to do with him. His place in the universe is to answer your bell, and from your point of view he should only exist by intermission. He has been trained to adapt himself to this point of view, and he does so with remarkable success. He not only rigidly abstains from bidding you good-morning, but he abstains equally from responding to the good-morning which in a moment of culpable inconsistency you may have offered him. A couple of months since, paying a visit to a friend in the country, I drove to the door with a gentleman whom I had met at the station, and who was engaged in the same pleasant errand as myself. The butler who admitted us stood motionless and inarticulate as we crossed the threshold, with his eyes, in the manner of butlers, fixed upon our boots. He was a very admirable servant, and having, in the course of twenty-four hours, taken the measure of this fact, I on the following day called my companion's attention to it. My companion was an Englishman, but he was young and perhaps foolishly sentimental. "Oh yes, he's an excellent servant," he said, "but he might give one a faint sign of recognition when one arrives."--"You had seen him, then," I asked, "before?"--"I have stayed in the house half a dozen times, and half a dozen times on departing I have given him the sidelong tip; yet whenever I arrive he gives me a stony stare, as if I were a perfect stranger." But the stony stare, for butlers, is not simply the English custom: I think it may be said that it is the English ideal.

I have wandered very far from the potential little tables for ices in--where shall I say?--in Oxford street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should hover about them. I am afraid they would not be very pleasant. In such matters everything hangs together, and I am afraid that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonize with the scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle,--these, I confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair. At this time, however, one's social studies must, at the least, be studies of low life, for wherever you may go for a stroll or to spend your summer afternoon the unfashionable side of things is uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of weary British tramps. You see among them some magnificent specimens of weariness. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their purple necks and car-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats, make them look like stage villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of penal servitude--that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some one with those huge square heels that are turned up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half England, and of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic attractiveness. These six feet of brown grass are their present sufficiency, but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next, and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.

The month of August is so unfashionable in London that going a few days since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but half a dinner. The hotel (where you are supposed to be able to obtain one of the best dinners in England) had put out its stoves and locked up its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban dining-places. I don't know how it may be at this time with Richmond, but the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to the element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All genteel people leave London after the first week in August, _ergo_ those who remain behind are not genteel, and cannot therefore rise to the conception of a "fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready? I had other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I hasten to declare that during the genteel period the dinner at Greenwich is the best of all dinners. It begins with fish and it continues with fish: what it ends with--except songs and speeches and affectionate partings--I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed; for I do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly indiscreet I should risk an allusion to the particular banquet which was the occasion of my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich _cuisine_. I should say that it is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever and distinguished men before the large windows that look out upon the broad brown Thames. The ships swim by as if they were part of the entertainment and put down in the bill: the afternoon light fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. We partake of any number of those sauces with which, according to the French adage, one could dine upon one's grandmother. To speak of the particular merits of my companions would indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a high appreciation of the manly frankness and robustness of English conviviality. The stranger--the American at least--who finds himself in the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in the magnificent temperament of the race. This seems to him one of the finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention. It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old society--a society in which every one that a newcomer meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the most finished art.

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a loss as to how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the sooty fronts: in these rigidly-unfeatured edifices it is impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect their hideousness. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges: above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer is dingy and begrimed: it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an harmonious dinginess; and the whole picture, glazed over with the glutinous London mist, becomes a masterpiece of bituminous-looking color. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and in its own sombre fashion it is extremely picturesque. Like so many of the aspects of English civilization that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of being serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses, the dreary people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical picturesqueness hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British empire.

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich Observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child in woodcuts in school geographies, and in the corners of large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house standing among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an ineffable joy to run straight down that bank. Close at hand was usually something printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography--the countries of fantastic outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the spot from which longitude is calculated; there was the plain little façade with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old to find that I did not forthwith proceed to taste of this delight. There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent dwarfish chestnut trees, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the waterside, and the great pompous buildings of the old hospital, which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into a kind of naval academy.