“Oh come, I can’t stand this!” cries Bunker, jumping up with his napkin round his neck, and striding over to the head-waiter, where he stands in a Turveydroppy attitude, leaning against a sideboard with his arms folded.  “Look here!” Bunker ejaculates:  “can you be made to understand that we are in a hurry?  Would half a dollar be any inducement to you to wake up and look around lively?  Because we have got to take those cars in exactly twelve minutes,” showing his watch, “and as the dinner is already paid for, I want to get it before I go.”

“Certainly, sir,” says the pompous ass with slow indifference, “dinner directly.  John!” to our waiter, who is now placing the meat on the table, “serve the genl’m’n’s dinner directly.”

Bunker stares at the fellow as Clown stares at Harlequin after having cut him in two, in dumb amazement at the fact that Harlequin is not in the least disturbed by being cut in two.

“I wonder,” he mutters as he returns to the table, “if that unmitigated wooden image of a dunderhead would pay any attention if I were to kick him?”

“No—­not if you were to tie a pack of fire-crackers to his coat-tail and light them.  He knows his business too well.  The first duty of an English head-waiter is to be dignified, as it is that of a French head-waiter to be vigilant and polite.”

“Besides,” remarks Amy quietly, “I don’t suppose the man had an idea of what you meant by ‘those cars,’ if he even knew what a half dollar signified.”

“Well, we must be off.  Time’s up.  We shall miss the train.  Good-bye, boys.  You can sit still and finish your dinner in peace.”

Good-bye to our friends from Paultons—­good-bye.  And then we rush out, and do miss the train.  It is five o’clock ten minutes and a quarter.

English trains go on time—­English dinners don’t.

We finally get off at seven o’clock.  Just before we leave a waiter comes up to me and says in a casual manner, “Found your humbreller yet, sir?”

“No.”

“Wat kind of er humbreller was it, sir?”

“Neat little brown silk umbrella, with an ivory handle.”

“W’y, I wouldn’t wonder if that was your humbreller in the corner now in the reading-room, sir.”

I make haste to look.  Yes, there it is, my beloved, long-lost umbrella, quietly leaning against the wall in a dark corner, behind a pillar, behind a big arm-chair, where nobody ever placed it, I’ll take my oath, but this rascally waiter, who expects to get a shilling for showing where he hid it.

“Is that your humbreller, sir?” the waiter says, rubbing his hands and getting in my way as I walk briskly out, at peril of being stumbled over by my hurrying feet.  I scorn to reply, but I give him a glance of such withering contempt that I trust it pierced to his wicked heart, and will remain there, a punishment and a warning, to the last day of his base life.  An English waiter’s hide is very thick, however.  He has probably hidden many a gentleman’s umbrella since.