SATURDAY DINNER.
We may be said to have had a Thanksgiving dinner once a week. But the principal dish was not fowl. Far from it. It was salt fish; but probably no better meal from this article of food is ever served on shore. With every desirable vegetable, and some sparkling champagne cider which a thoughtful friend had placed among our stores, we were rivals with Ruth when she sat beside the reapers of Boaz in the harvest field, and he reached her the parched corn “and she did eat and was sufficed and left.” For dessert we had at that meal “roly-poly,” which is thin flour paste spread with apple sauce, then rolled together and boiled; this with sweet sauce flavored with vanilla made us for the time imagine ourselves on shore. We entertained each other at these feasts with the choicest anecdotes, which our repasts disposed us to call to mind and to relish; for example, instances of Mr. Choate’s ingenuity, as, when defending a sea captain charged with cruelty to his crew, he undertook to show that so far from being cruel he was eminently considerate, so much so that instead of searching the law books to find out, as the witnesses alleged, what punishments were allowable and could be inflicted with impunity, he was only guarding himself against the excessive use of legitimate discipline; “he read the books with paternal yearnings; he was a mild but firm parent;” and instead of keeping his crew on vile trash, tasteless, sometime loathsome, “think, gentlemen of the jury, of applying such words to the nutritious lob scouse and the succulent dandy funk!” How could the jury help saying as they presently did, Not guilty?