Connected with the Conversation House is a _restaurateur_, who is at the same time a _limonadier_ and _glacier_. There is nothing that the _Café de Paris_, the _Maison d’or_, _Tortoni_, the _Rocher de Cancale_, or the _Trois frères Provençaux_ can furnish, that you do not find on the _carte_ of this practical _epicure_; while instead of the glass-boxes in which you are obliged to dine or sup, in Paris, you are here served in a spacious gallery, ornamented with plants and flowers from the four quarters of the globe, a thousand times reflected in gigantic mirrors. Every thing here seems to be arranged by the hands of a kind fairy, and the repasts themselves are served with a promptitude and a precision as if the spirits attending you were obeying the magic wand of an enchanter.
A reading-room and a circulating library are also connected with the establishment. The latter contains the standard works, and the latest publications in English, French, and German you are sure to find there the best; and there is no club in England that can furnish a greater variety of newspapers, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish journals, with the New York Herald, and the Courier and Enquirer.
It is long past midnight when you return home, but the hotels, and many private residences, are still lit up, and music, that sweet concomitant of life in Germany, is still greeting you as you wind your way through the crooked streets.
In no part of Europe do you see a British peer dining _table d’hôte_; but the watering-places of Germany make an exception from the rule. I have seen the most aristocratic leaders of the Tory party (that was)—certainly not without a proper train of English toadies—lieutenant-generals in the army of the historical house of S——t, and India nabobs, content with the public ordinary, though the ladies of the party are seldom seen without a _dragon_. “What is a dragon?” will some of my readers ask. I will explain. A dragon, applied to a young English gentlewoman is what an “_elephant_” is applied to a German. It consists of an old maiden aunt, or some other distant relation, whose business it is to superintend the conduct of a young lady that is just “out.” Her functions resemble those of the old nurse in Romeo and Juliet, only that she is much more watchful, and seldom or ever to be bribed. If you attempt to corrupt her, you rouse the British lion, or the Dragon of St. George; hence the name, which has been given them by the French. The acerbity of the temper of English dragons renders them generally lean and gaunt; but in Germany, where good nature abounds, they grow fat, though with a dogged obstinacy which is as insulting as it is provoking, they will squat down on the sofa right between you and the lady you wish to entertain; proving a most palpable objection to a _tête-à-tête_, for which reason they are properly called “elephants.”