Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/171

168 dollar—about seventy-five cents. This is without wine. We dine usually at one, but we have been at the five o'clock table, and we see no other difference than the more aristocratic price of that aristocratic hour. Besides the trifling advantage of dining at one in reference to health, it leaves the best hours of the day free for out-of-door pleasures. The order and accompaniments of our dinner are agreeable; the tables are set on three sides of a spacious salon à mangerdining room [sic], with a smaller table in the centre of the room, where the landlord (who carves artistically) carves the dinner. His eyes are everywhere. Not a guest escapes his observation, not a waiter omits his duty.

When the clock is close upon the stroke of one, people may be seen from every direction bending their steps towards the hotel. You leave your hats and bonnets in an ante-room. The ober kelner (head-waiter) receives you at the door, and conducts you to your seats. The table is always covered with clean (not very fine) German table-linen, and of course, supplied with napkins. Pots with choice odorous plants in flower are set at short intervals the whole length of the table; a good band of music is playing in the orchestra. The dinner-service is a coarse white porcelain. As soon as you are seated, little girls come round with baskets of bouquets, which you are offered without solicitation. You may have one, if you will, for a halfpenny, and a sweet smile from the little flower-girl thrown into the bargain. Then come young women with a printed sheet