In the City, where lunching places abound, the steamer works overtime and the stewpan never rests.  There is one place, well advertised to American visitors, where they make a specialty of their beefsteak-and-kidney pudding.  This is a gummy concoction containing steak, kidney, mushroom, oyster, lark—­and sometimes W and Y. Doctor Johnson is said to have been very fond of it; this, if true, accounts for the doctor’s disposition.  A helping of it weighs two pounds before you eat it and ten pounds afterward.  The kidney is its predominating influence.  The favorite flower of the English is not the primrose.  It is the kidney.  Wherever you go, among the restaurants, there is always somebody operating on a steamed flour dumpling for kidney trouble.

The lower orders are much addicted to a dish known—­if I remember the name aright—­by the euphonious title of Toad in the Hole.  Toad in the Hole consists of a full-grown and fragrant sheep’s kidney entombed in an excavated retreat at the heart of a large and powerful onion, and then cooked in a slow and painful manner, so that the onion and the kidney may swap perfumes and flavors.  These people do not use this combination for a weapon or for a disinfectant, or for anything else for which it is naturally purposed; they actually go so far as to eat it.  You pass a cabmen’s lunchroom and get a whiff of a freshly opened Toad in the Hole —­and you imagine it is the German invasion starting and wonder why they are not removing the women and children to a place of safety.  All England smells like something boiling, just as all France smells like something that needs boiling.

Seemingly the only Londoners who enjoy any extensive variety in their provender are the slum-dwellers.  Out Whitechapel-way the establishment of a tripe dresser and draper is a sight wondrous to behold, and will almost instantly eradicate the strongest appetite; but it is not to be compared with an East End meatshop, where there are skinned sheep faces on slabs, and various vital organs of various animals disposed about in clumps and clusters.  I was reminded of one of those Fourteenth Street museums of anatomy—­tickets ten cents each; boys under fourteen not admitted.  The East End butcher is not only a thrifty but an inquiring soul.  Until I viewed his shop I had no idea that a sheep could be so untidy inside; and as for a cow—­he finds things in a cow she didn’t know she had.

Breakfast is the meal at which the Englishman rather excels; in fact England is the only country in Europe where the natives have the faintest conception of what a regular breakfast is, or should be.  Moreover, it is now possible in certain London hotels for an American to get hot bread and ice-water at breakfast, though the English round about look on with undisguised horror as he consumes them, and the manager only hopes that he will have the good taste not to die on the premises.