Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/127

 served with, the one course after another, with the one indigestible dish after another, eating and being silent. I have never heard such a silence as at these great dinners. In order not to go to sleep, I am obliged to eat, to eat without being hungry, and dishes, too, which do not agree with me. And all the while I feel such an emotion of impatience and wrath at this mode of wasting time and God's good gifts, and that in so stupidly wearisome a manner, that I am just ready to fling dish and plate on the floor and repay hospitality by a sermon of rebuke, if I only had courage enough. But I am silent, and suffer and grumble and scold in silence. Not quite beautiful this; but I cannot help it! I was yesterday at one of these great dinners—a horrible feast! Two elderly gentlemen, lawyers, sat opposite me, sat and dozed while they opened their mouths to put in the delicacies which were offered to them. At our peasant-weddings, where people also sit three hours at table, there are, nevertheless, talk and toasts, and gifts for the bride and bridegroom, and fiddlers to play in every dish; but here one has nothing but the meat. And the dinners in Denmark! I cannot but think of them, with their few but excellent dishes, and animated cheerful guests, who merely were sometimes too loud in their zeal for talking, and making themselves heard; the wit, the joke, the stories, the toasts, the conversations, that merry, free, lively laisser aller, which distinguishes Danish social life; in truth, it was champagne—champagne for soul and body at the entertainments there!—the last at which I was present in Europe before I came hither. But these entertainments here! they are destined to hell, as Heiberg says in “A Soul after Death,” and they are called “the tiresome.” And they ought to be introduced into the Litany. On this occasion, however, Fortune was kind to me and placed by my side the interesting clergyman, Dr. Hawks, who during dinner explained to me with his