Of these kinds of entertainments, the breakfast, though pleasant enough when the company is agreeable, as I always found it, is the least convenient of all times and modes of visiting.  You have already interviewed one breakfast, and are expecting soon to be coquetting with a tempting luncheon.  If one had as many stomachs as a ruminant, he would not mind three or four serious meals a day, not counting the tea as one of them.  The luncheon is a very convenient affair:  it does not require special dress; it is informal; it is soon over, and may be made light or heavy, as one chooses.  The afternoon tea is almost a necessity in London life.  It is considered useful as “a pick me up,” and it serves an admirable purpose in the social system.  It costs the household hardly any trouble or expense.  It brings people together in the easiest possible way, for ten minutes or an hour, just as their engagements or fancies may settle it.  A cup of tea at the right moment does for the virtuous reveller all that Falstaff claims for a good sherris-sack, or at least the first half of its “twofold operation:”  “It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, which delivered over to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.”

But it must have the right brain to work upon, and I doubt if there is any brain to which it is so congenial and from which it brings so much as that of a first-rate London old lady.  I came away from the great city with the feeling that this most complex product of civilization was nowhere else developed to such perfection.  The octogenarian Londoness has been in society,—­let us say the highest society,—­all her days.  She is as tough as an old macaw, or she would not have lasted so long.  She has seen and talked with all the celebrities of three generations, all the beauties of at least half a dozen decades.  Her wits have been kept bright by constant use, and as she is free of speech it requires some courage to face her.  Yet nobody can be more agreeable, even to young persons, than one of these precious old dowagers.  A great beauty is almost certainly thinking how she looks while one is talking with her; an authoress is waiting to have one praise her book; but a grand old lady, who loves London society, who lives in it, who understands young people and all sorts of people, with her high-colored recollections of the past and her grand-maternal interests in the new generation, is the best of companions, especially over a cup of tea just strong enough to stir up her talking ganglions.