A Sixth Has Eaten His Fill, Lights A
Cigarette, And Resigns Himself To Digestion.
A seventh has just
dropped in, and calls for soup.
Number eight, meanwhile, has left
the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano under powerful
and uncertain fingers.
Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go
along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is
organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures,
get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes -
suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-
lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light
picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every
vine-leaf on the wall - sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket
made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the
long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-
trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and
every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these
two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.
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