tion, are absolutely useless to you. The
reading to you of the "Quae genus," or "As in praesenti," could not be
more uninteresting. Try to undergo the same thing in your own house
on a Wednesday afternoon, and see where you will be. To those ladies
and gentlemen who had been assembled in Mrs Mackenzie's drawing-room
this prolonged waiting had been as though the length of the sermon
had been doubled, or as if it had fallen on them at some unexpected
and unauthorised time.

But now they descended, each gentleman taking his allotted lady, and
Colza's voice was again heard. At the bottom of the stairs, just
behind the dining-room door, stood the tyrant, looking very great,
repressing with his left hand the housemaid who was behind him. She
having observed Sarah at the top of the kitchen stairs telegraphing
for assistance, had endeavoured to make her way to her friend while
Tom Mackenzie and Mrs Slumpy were still upon the stairs; but the
tyrant, though he had seen the cook's distress, had refused and
sternly kept the girl a prisoner behind him. Ruat dinner, fiat
genteel deportment.

The order of the construction of the dinner was no doubt a la Russe;
and why should it not have been so, as Tom Mackenzie either had or
was supposed to have as much as eight hundred a year? But I think
it must be confessed that the architecture was in some degree
composite. It was a la Russe, because in the centre there was a green
arrangement of little boughs with artificial flowers fixed on them,
and because there were figs and raisins, and little dishes with dabs
of preserve on them, all around the green arrangement; but the soups
and fish were on the table, as was also the wine, though it was
understood that no one was to be allowed to help himself or his
neighbour to the contents of the bottle. When Dr Slumpy once made
an attempt at the sherry, Grandairs was down upon him instantly,
although laden at the time with both potatoes and sea-kale; after
that he went round and frowned at Dr Slumpy, and Dr Slumpy understood
the frown.

That the soup should be cold, everybody no doubt expected. It was
clear soup, made chiefly of Marsala, and purchased from the pastry
cook's in Store Street. Grandairs, no doubt, knew all about it, as he
was connected with the same establishment. The fish--Mrs Mackenzie
had feared greatly about her fish, having necessarily trusted its
fate solely to her own cook--was very ragged in its appearance, and
could not be