Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT A VERY Pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said a propos of his having designed a very Early English chair: 1 After all, if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair ' I thought the remark rather delicious, as also his other remark when one day in a curiosity-shop we were looking at another chair, which the dealer declared to be Norman. My friend seated himself in it very gravely, and after softly moving about from side to side, testing it, it would appear, by the sensation it imparted to the sitting portion of his limbs, he solemnly decided: ' I don't think the flavour of this chair is Norman ' I thought of this Pre-Raphaelite brother as the Sphinx and I were seated a few even- D ings ago at our usual little dinner, in our usual little sheltered corner, on the Lover's Gallery of one of the great London restaurants. The Sphinx says that there is only one place in Europe where one can really dine, but as it is impossible to be always within reasonable train service of that Mont- salvat of cookery, she consents to eat with me?she cannot call it dine?at the restaurant of which I speak. I being very simple- minded, untravelled, and unlanguaged, think it, in my Cockney heart, a very fine place indeed, with its white marble pillars surrounding the spacious peristyle, and flashing with a thousand brilliant lights and colours; with its stately cooks, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, ranged behind a great altar loaded with big silver dishes, and the sacred musicians of the temple ranged behind them?while in and out go the waiters, clothed in white and black, waiters so good and kind that I am compelled to think of Elijah being waited on by angels. They have such an eye for a romance, too, and really ...