Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1878 - Inland voyage

6 An lit land Voyage,
Belghun^ was of a nondescript occasional cha-
racter ; indeed I have never been able to detect
anything in the nature oi a meal among this
pleasing people ; they seem to peck and trifle
with viands all day long in an amateur spirit :
tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
falling between the two.
The empty birdcage, swept and garnished,
and with no trace of the old piping favourite,
save where two wires had been pushed apart to
hold its lump of sugar, carried with it a sort
of graveyard cheer. The engineer apprentices
would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to
the bagman ; but talked low and sparingly to
one another, or raked us in the gaslight with a
gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads,
they were all (in the Scotch phrase) barnacled.
There was an English maid in the hotel, who
had been long enough out of England to pick
up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts