A large, zinc-lined trough half full of water stood against the wall in an ante-chamber. Here men by the score were washing their hands and faces and drying them near by on roller towels. They then passed singly through the wicket at the dining-room door, where stood a man who punched each boarder’s ticket as he entered.
Long wooden tables, heaped with dishes and lined with round-bottom stools, ran the great length of the room. The men took places in the order of their coming, until they had filled one table, when they would begin upon another, and there arose a deafening clatter of knives and forks and dishes and a tumult of mingled speech.
That dinner serves as a good illustration of our fare, both in what it offered and in what it lacked. A bowl of hot soup was at each man’s place when he sat down, and, after finishing this, he was given a choice between roast beef and Irish stew. There were potatoes boiled in their jackets, and pork-and-beans, and bread in wide variety and in enormous quantity, and a choice of tea or coffee, and finally a pudding for dessert. Some of this was good, but all of it smacked of wholesale preparation, and appetites nicer than those of workingmen would have found difficulties with the dinner. Even ours were not proof against it all. I was struggling with a slice of tough roast beef out of which the virtue had been cooked, when suddenly I caught an expression of comical dismay stealing over the ruddy, bristling face of the man opposite me. He was eating a piece of meat from a plate of Irish stew, and he spat it out upon the floor with a deep-drawn oath, and a frank assurance to his neighbors that “the meat was rotten,” while his facial muscles were contorted with strong disgust. And the pudding was of such uncertain nature as to recall vividly the oft-repeated saying of a classmate at a college eating-club, that “flies in a pudding are quite as good as currants.” Still the pork-and-beans were excellent and the bread and potatoes fine, and the coffee, which was served in large cups with the roast, was not impossible; certainly it was a well-fed crowd which sat smoking for a quarter of an hour or more on the rough embankments overlooking the Agricultural Building before going back to work.