departure for
Moultrassie Hall.

CHAPTER III

Here's neither want of appetite nor mouths;
Pray Heaven we be not scant of meat or mirth!
--OLD PLAY.

Even upon ordinary occasions, and where means were ample, a great
entertainment in those days was not such a sinecure as in modern times,
when the lady who presides has but to intimate to her menials the day
and hour when she wills it to take place. At that simple period, the
lady was expected to enter deeply into the arrangement and provision of
the whole affair; and from a little gallery, which communicated with
her own private apartment, and looked down upon the kitchen, her shrill
voice was to be heard, from time to time, like that of the warning
spirit in a tempest, rising above the clash of pots and stewpans--the
creaking spits--the clattering of marrowbones and cleavers--the
scolding of cooks--and all the other various kinds of din which form an
accompaniment to dressing a large dinner.

But all this toil and anxiety was more than doubled in the case of the
approaching feast at Martindale Castle, where the presiding Genius
of the festivity was scarce provided with adequate means to carry her
hospitable purpose into effect. The tyrannical conduct of husbands,
in such cases, is universal; and I scarce know one householder of my
acquaintance who has not, on some ill-omened and most inconvenient
season, announced suddenly to his innocent helpmate, that he had invited

"Some odious Major Rock,
To drop in at six o'clock."

to the great discomposure of the lady, and the discredit, perhaps, of
her domestic arrangements.

Peveril of the Peak was still more thoughtless; for he had directed his
lady to invite the whole honest men of the neighbourhood to make good
cheer at Martindale Castle, in honour of the blessed Restoration of his
most sacred Majesty, without precisely explaining where the provisions
were to come from. The deer-park had lain waste ever since the siege;
the dovecot could do little to furnish forth such an entertainment;
the fishponds, it is true, were well provided (which the neighbouring
Presbyterians noted as a suspicious circumstance); and game was to be
had for the shooting, upon the extensive heaths and hills of
Derbyshire. But these were but the secondary parts of a banquet; and
the house-steward and bailiff, Lady Peveril's only coadjutors and
counsellors, could n