Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/163

4, 1860.] 

 She sat alone, on the cold grey stone, And the river flow’d with a sadder moan.

She heard the hum of the distant town, The patter of dead leaves falling down.

She heard the toad in the long dank grass, But never his tread,—alas, alas!

The morning came with its golden light, To the sycamore trees so bare and white.

The mists that slept on the river’s brim Went up like the wings of the cherubim.

The water-lilies so cold and fair Were tangled with tresses of bright brown hair.

The osiers bent with a quiet grace Over a form with a still, white face.

The river flow’d with a desolate moan, And dead leaves fell on the cold grey stone.



was one cold night in December last, when the mercury was almost frozen in the bulb of the thermometer, and when only repeated applications of the mittened hand to the nose could save that valuable organ from the fate of an exposed carrot on a greengrocer’s stall, that I found myself in the company of my friend Wagstaff on the Boulevard Poissonnière, on our return from the Theatre of the Porte St. Martin, whither some novelty had tempted us to spend the evening. There is nothing like cold to stimulate the appetite, unless it may be a drama of horrors and a rattling farce afterwards. Sorrow and mirth are both exhaustive, and there is something in the very atmosphere of a theatre that disposes the gastric juice to flow into the stomach. In England we have known a person to commence an attack on a packet of ham-sandwiches as soon as the curtain was raised,—to feed through a five-act tragedy, and to retire, when the curtain was dropped, unsatisfied by additional apples, oranges, and ginger-beer.

By one of those instincts which Edgar Poe attributes to one of his characters, I knew what my friend Wagstaff’s thoughts were running upon. He was thinking of the Adelphi, the Olympic, and a lobster supper. Not that he is either a fast man or a gourmand, by any means; but he has lived long enough to associate the stomach of the brain with the stomach lodged under the ribs, and is alive to the fact that, when the former is full the latter is fasting. Of a sudden I felt that the current of his thoughts had entered a particular channel, but all my prescience did not prepare me for the proposition he placed before me suddenly:

“What say you to a snail supper?”

“With all my heart,” I replied; which, on my part, was a piece of unsophisticated bounce, as my heart rather heaved at the notion; but my vanity of knowingness would not allow me to appear ignorant, and I should have made the same answer, probably, had he proposed a dish of grilled Salamander.