Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/92



him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place in the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per night―'Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillings per week.' I was a respectable single man then. I boarded and resided there. I boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining-room or restaurant down stairs. They called it dining-rooms, but it was only one room, and there wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man―he was a living skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the 'roast beef one,' and 'roast lamb one,' 'corn beef and cabbage one,' 'veal and stuffing one,' and the 'veal and pickled pork,' one―or two, or three, as the case might be―and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings―we handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well as we could. The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was adjacent, and it contained the 70