I Really Thought I Should Have Run Away From
The House; But The True Family Blood, I Suppose, Began
To Show Itself, And With A Calmness Almost Frightful, I
Received Them One By One.
After this began the public toasts.
Although up to this time I had kept a certain portion of
my wits about me, the subsequent hours of the entertainment
became henceforth developed in a dreamy mystery. I can
perfectly recall the look of the sheaf of glasses that
stood before me, six in number; I could draw the pattern
of each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always
be full, though I did nothing but empty them, - and at
last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a
kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence,
had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were
disembodied, - a distant spectator of my own performances,
and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The
voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice,
became thin and low, as though they reached me through
a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was as
to an audience in another sphere, and in a language of
another state of being: yet, however unintelligible to
myself, I must have been in some sort understood, for at
the end of each sentence, cheers, faint as the roar of
waters on a far-off strand, floated towards me; and if
I am to believe a report of the proceedings subsequently
shown us, I must have become polyglot in my cups.
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