A double Day's Work. 295 moody, like barn-door fowls in a shower; some of the party went to sleep. Not so the waiter for there was but one. A double day's work had come upon him. The last wave of travellers had been thrown back, and met the tide from town, until it filled the house. Having nothing to do, they all wanted something "to take," immediately. Idleness is the hardest work in the world; the idle man never knows what it is to rest, and so must be fed. Accordingly, when a number of them get together and help one another, they necessarily consume a vast amount of victual. But, as I have said, our waiter multiplied himself, and met all demands. Waiting is a gift, and exhibits some most remarkable combinations of mental power. It is not enough to say that a waiter has to recollect the different orders he receives, and execute them at once; this does not do him justice. On the Continent, his task is much facilitated by the table-d'hôte, for in England our insular dissociable habits make a waiter's post a hundredfold more hard. You are not conducted to the same spot at the dinner-table day after day; you do not dine at a fixed hour, but sit down when and where you like. The waiter must bear in mind the number of your room, and connect that with 296 Permutations and Combinations. the various items of your capricious and particular meals. There were a good many people in our inn; the number of our room was 29, and that was on the first floor. The second was also full. Here were a set of new faces to be learned only for one night. Each tenant had, say, three meals-dinner, tea, breakfast. Now, considering that the minute details of all these had to be remembered, chops to be associated with A, soup with B, sherryand-water with this man, soda-and-brandy with that, bottled stout or draught ale with a third-all being of various prices; considering, too, that the stream of permutations and combinations of customers went on for hours, and that all had to be presented with so many bills, without entanglement or substitution, at the same moment, the next morning; under the trying pressure of a steamer's departure, and the arrival of a fresh trainful of passengers, merely passing through the house, but calling for goes of this, that, or the other, at the bar as they hurried by biscuits, cigars, with "I've no small change," "I've nothing but French money," &c., while the amount was being made out considering all this, I say it required an eye and memory of no common power to perform the duties of a waiter. Only a Waiter! 297 Besides being able to fix and arrange a crowd of facts in his mind, the waiter must be able to dismiss them at once; to sponge the slate of his memory, and begin to cover it again immediately with details, whose very similarity is the most dangerous and perplexing part of the business—and this, day after day, week after week. With all these duties, the waiter must not stop to think. With a head full of orders on the point of being discharged, he must submit to be called back for a spoon, or to say where the coat with an umbrella strapped to it, not the shawl with the parasol, was put, when No. 17 came back from the boat, and changed his room to No. 37. Only a waiter! Why, no prime minister in his place, in presence of a jealous minority, can need greater promptness, accuracy, and elasticity of mind. The waiter, indeed, answers at a disadvantage; he has no notice of questions, but is expected to be always at his post, ready with a reply, in a house where Government business, as well as that of private members, is being conducted through continuous sittings, morning, noon, and night, for the whole period of his holding office. Indeed, a waiter must not only have his wits about him, but wits of a remarkable order. Unlike 298 A Bar of his Own. many earning less than he, he cannot see his work grow under his hand; he cannot hope to perform it mechanically, like a man laying bricks or rowing a boat; he is always beginning intercourse with strangers. See how grateful he evidently is for kind, considerate treatment! Who would not relieve the anxious monotony of his work with a pleasant word? Who would grudge him the small gratuity, so that he may at last settle down in some business, in which he is not only the jaded medium between the producer and consumer, but a sharer in the main profits along with the trim chamber-maid? Let us hope they may save enough, ere long, to club their fortunes, and to possess, though it be a humble one, a bar of their own. ( 299 ) LONDON SCHOOL TREATS. HE Annual Treat has now become quite an educational institution. The day is prized in the future and in retrospect. The children, with a delicious rejection of all responsibility, magnify the arduousness and specialities of the excursion as the day approaches, and when it has passed recount their extravagance and feats with slowly-fading interest throughout the remainder of the summer. The anxious manager, too, thinks quite as much of the business as the most heedless little trot; he dreads the coming possibilities of accident, and no one walks off with more relief than he when the day is over, and the twenty van-loads of scatterbrained children have been safely emptied into the street by the school, without fracture or loss. It may seem an easy thing, with all the appliances of London, to take from 500 to 1,000 children for a day into the country; but you must not forget that there can be no |