the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of
the vanquished in it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.
The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out a
breath to meet us. Victor's crowded saloon-carriage was one voice of
eulogy, to raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting over
Wrensham Station at the start Londonward. How had she managed? We
foolishly question the arts of magicians.

Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is half a
century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the display
of slaughtered herds and their devourers. He had picked out his vegetable
and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them uncontaminated;
enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was, that he did not
complain. When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in wrath at him for
systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on the maceration of his
animal part, he put on his martyr's pride, which assumed a perfect
contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing systems: he was
drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered our animal part
shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that much of the
immorality of the world was due to the present excessive indulgence in
meats. 'Not in drink?' Miss Graves inquired. 'No,' he said boldly; 'not
equally; meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking life--of
fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad blood made:
cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be looked back on,
as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that pass. I say, that
for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly, or at least on the
morrow.'

'Paid by the drunkard's wife, you should say.'

'Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the
least-generous of the vices.'

Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare, that
it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
sex. They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another's practises;
they might have exposed to Coln