administer our
supplies; our father and mother dining, with such guests as might happen
to be present, late in the evening. We were sometimes allowed to come in
at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins and exhibit our infantile good
manners. This domestic separation was a matter of much speculation and
curiosity to our immature minds; we used to haunt the hall through which
the servants carried the dishes, smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen
to the dining-room, and once in a while the too-indulgent creatures
would allow us to steal something. How ravishingly delicious things thus
acquired taste! And we, fancying, of course, that they must be not less
delicious for the folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever
bear to leave off eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate
compared with the archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were
as far inferior in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing
banquets at which, in some great houses, our father and mother were
present. Consider, for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among
such functions, at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve
persons at table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers
were on the table before the soup was served; being removed, they
revealed turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and
roast goose, and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including
chicken-pies, ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being
placed in their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was
a vast round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the
sweets were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine,
not including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all
the way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic
compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts
and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were
people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners six
or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually ate and
drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The
ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were
descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such
prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken
class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very dif