But it is time that we visit the restaurant.  This is located in a stately building and is one of the first class.  It overlooks the old Plaza, though you enter from the street one block west of the Plaza.  You ascend broad stairs, and then you find yourself in a wide room or dining hall in two sections.  Here are tables round and square, and here you are waited on by the sons of the Fiery Flying Dragon clad in well-made tunics, sometimes of silk material.  As your eye studies the figure before you, the dress and the physiognomy, you do not fail to notice the long pigtail, the Chinaman’s glory, as a woman’s delight is her long hair.  The tea, which is fragrant, is served to you out of dainty cups, China cups, an evidence that the tea-drinking of Americans and Europeans is derived from the Celestial Empire.  The tea-plant is said, by a pretty legend, to have been formed from the eyelids of Buddha Dharma, which, in his generosity, he cut off for the benefit of men.  If you wish for sweetmeats they will be served in a most tempting way.  You can also have chicken, rice, and vegetables, and fruits, after the Chinese fashion.  You can eat with your fingers if you like, or use knives and forks, or, if you desire to play the Chinaman, with the chop-sticks.  In Chinatown the men and the women do not eat together.  This is also the custom of China, and hence there is not what we look upon as an essential element of home-life—­father and mother and children and guests, if there be such, gathered in a pleasant dining-room with the flow of edifying conversation and the exchange of courtesies.  Confucius never talked when he ate, and his disciples affect his taciturnity at their meals.  Though in scholastic times, in European institutions and in religious communities, men kept silence at their meals, yet the hours were enlivened by one who read for the edification of all.  The interchange of thought, however,—­the spoken word one with another, at the family table, is the better way.  Silence may be golden, but speech is more golden if seasoned with wisdom; and even the pleasant jest and the bon mot have their office and exercise a salutary influence on character and conduct.

The food of Chinamen generally is very simple.  Rice is the staple article of consumption.  They like fruits and use them moderately.  They eat things too, which would be most repulsive to the epicurean taste of an Anglo-Saxon.  Even lizards and rats and young dogs they will not refuse.  But these things are prepared in a manner to tempt the appetite.  After you have partaken of your repast in the Chinese Restaurant, if you request it, tobacco pipes will be brought in, and your waiter will fill and light them for you and your friends.  You can even, with a certain degree of caution, indulge in the opium pipe, the joy of the Chinaman.  As you draw on this pipe and take long draughts you lapse into a strange state, all your ills seem to vanish, and you become indifferent to the world.  The beggar in imagination