The European dinner is better than the European breakfast, but it has its faults and inferiorities; it does not satisfy.  He comes to the table eager and hungry; he swallows his soup—­there is an undefinable lack about it somewhere; thinks the fish is going to be the thing he wants —­eats it and isn’t sure; thinks the next dish is perhaps the one that will hit the hungry place—­tries it, and is conscious that there was a something wanting about it, also.  And thus he goes on, from dish to dish, like a boy after a butterfly which just misses getting caught every time it alights, but somehow doesn’t get caught after all; and at the end the exile and the boy have fared about alike; the one is full, but grievously unsatisfied, the other has had plenty of exercise, plenty of interest, and a fine lot of hopes, but he hasn’t got any butterfly.  There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d’ho^te perfectly satisfied; but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie.

The number of dishes is sufficient; but then it is such a monotonous variety of UNSTRIKING dishes.  It is an inane dead-level of “fair-to-middling.”  There is nothing to accent it.  Perhaps if the roast of mutton or of beef—­a big, generous one—­were brought on the table and carved in full view of the client, that might give the right sense of earnestness and reality to the thing; but they don’t do that, they pass the sliced meat around on a dish, and so you are perfectly calm, it does not stir you in the least.  Now a vast roast turkey, stretched on the broad of his back, with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing from his fat sides ... but I may as well stop there, for they would not know how to cook him.  They can’t even cook a chicken respectably; and as for carving it, they do that with a hatchet.

This is about the customary table d’ho^te bill in summer: 

Soup (characterless).

Fish—­sole, salmon, or whiting—­usually tolerably good.

Roast—­mutton or beef—­tasteless—­and some last year’s potatoes.

A pa^te, or some other made dish—­usually good—­“considering.”

One vegetable—­brought on in state, and all alone—­usually insipid lentils, or string-beans, or indifferent asparagus.

Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper.

Lettuce-salad—­tolerably good.

Decayed strawberries or cherries.

Sometimes the apricots and figs are fresh, but this is no advantage, as these fruits are of no account anyway.

The grapes are generally good, and sometimes there
is a tolerably good peach, by mistake.

The variations of the above bill are trifling.  After a fortnight one discovers that the variations are only apparent, not real; in the third week you get what you had the first, and in the fourth the week you get what you had the second.  Three or four months of this weary sameness will kill the robustest appetite.