People I Have Met Author:Nathaniel Parker Willis 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: GETTING TO WINDWARD. CHAPTER I. London is an abominable place to dine in. I mean, of course, unless you are free of a club, invited out, or pay a ridi... more »culous price for a French dinner. The unknown stranger, adrift on the streets, with a traveller's notions of the worth of things to eat, is much worse off, as to his venture for a meal, than he would be in the worst town of the worst province of France—much worse off than he would be in New York or New Orleans. There is a " Very's," it is true, and there are one or two restaurants, so called, in the Haymarket; but it is true, notwithstanding, that short of a two-guinea dinner at the Clarendon, or some hotel of this class, the next best thing is a simple pointed steak, with potatoes, at a chop-house. The admirable club-system (admirable for club-members) has absorbed all the intermediate degrees of eating-houses, and the traveller's chance and solitary meal must be either absurdly expensive, or dismally furnished and attended. The only real liberty one ever enjoys in a metropolis is the interval (longer or shorter, as one is more or less a philosopher) between his arrival and the delivery of his letters of introduction. While perfectly unknown, dreading no rencontre of acquaintances, subject to no care of dress, equipage, or demeanor, the stranger feels, what he never feels afterward, a complete abandon to what immediately surrounds him, a complete willingness to be amused in any shape which chance pleases to offer, and, his desponding loneliness serving him like the dark depths of a well, he sees lights invisible from the higher level of amusement. Tired of my solitary meals in the parlor of a hotel during my first week in London, I made the round of such dining-places as I could inquire out at the West End—of course...« less