“This Mr. Williams, as well as yourself, Timms, must be more cautious, or the law will yet assert its power. It is very much humbled, I am aware, under the majesty of the people and a feeble administration of its authority; but its arm is long, and its gripe potent, when it chooses to exert its force. Take my advice, and have no more to do with such arrangements.”
The dinner-bell put an end to the discussion. Timms vanished like a ghost; but Dunscomb, whose habits were gentlemanlike, and who knew that Mrs. Horton had assigned a particular seat to him, moved more deliberately; following his nephew about the time Timms was half through the meal.
An American tavern-dinner, during the sitting of the circuit, is every way worthy of a minute and graphic description; but our limits will hardly admit of our assuming the task. If “misery makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows,” so does the law. Judges, advocates, witnesses, sheriffs, clerks, constables, and not unfrequently the accused, dine in common, with rail-road speed. The rattling of knives, forks, and spoons, the clatter of plates, the rushing of waiters, landlord, landlady, chamber-maids, ostler and bar-keeper included, produce a confusion that would do honour to the most profound “republican simplicity.” Everything approaches a state of nature but the eatables; and they are invariably overdone. On an evil day, some Yankee invented an article termed a “cooking-stove;” and since its appearance everything like good cookery has vanished from the common American table. There is plenty spoiled; abundance abused. Of made dishes, with the exception of two or three of very simple characters, there never were any; and these have been burned to cinders by the baking processes of the “cook-stoves.”
It matters little, however, to the convives of a circuit-court dinner, what the dishes are called, or of what they are composed. “Haste” forbids “taste;” and it actually occurred that day, as it occurs almost invariably on such occasions, that a very clever country practitioner was asked the materiel of the dish he had been eating, and he could not tell it! Talk of the mysteries of French cookery! The “cook-stove” produces more mystery than all the art of all the culinary artists of Paris; and this, too, on a principle that tallies admirably with that of the purest “republican simplicity;” since it causes all things to taste alike.
To a dinner of this stamp Dunscomb now sat down, just ten minutes after the first clatter of a plate was heard, and just as the only remove was seen, in the form of slices of pie, pudding and cake. With his habits, railroad speed or lightning-line eating could find no favour; and he and Jack got their dinner, as best they might, amid the confusion and remnants of the close of such a repast. Nine-tenths of those who had so lately been at work as trencher-men were now picking their teeth, smoking segars, or preparing fresh quids for the afternoon. A few clients were already holding their lawyers by the button; and here and there one of the latter led the way to his room to “settle” some slander cause in which the plaintiff had got frightened.
It is a bad sign when eating is carried on without conversation.[conversation.] To converse, however, at such a table, is morally if not physically impossible. Morally, because each man’s mind is so intent on getting as much as he wants, that it is almost impossible to bring his thoughts to bear on any other subject; physically, on account of the clatter, a movement in which an eclipse of a plate by the body of a waiter is no unusual thing, and universal activity of the teeth. Conversation under such circumstances would be truly a sort of ventriloquism; the portion of the human frame included in the term being all in all just at that moment.
Notwithstanding these embarrassments and unpleasant accompaniments, Dunscomb and his nephew got their dinners, and were about to quit the table as McBrain entered. The doctor would not expose his bride to the confusion of the common table, where there was so much that is revolting to all trained in the usages of good company, singularly blended with a decency of deportment, and a consideration for the rights of each, that serve to form bright spots in American character; but he had obtained a more private room for the females of his party.
“We should do pretty well,” observed McBrain, in explaining his accommodations, “were it not for a troublesome neighbour in an adjoining room, who is either insane or intoxicated. Mrs. Horton has put us in your wing, and I should think you must occasionally hear from him too?”
“The man is constantly drunk, they tell me, and is a little troublesome at times. On the whole, however, he does not annoy me much. I shall take the liberty of dining with you to-morrow, Ned; this eating against time does not agree with my constitution.”
“To-morrow!—I was thinking that my examination would be ended this afternoon, and that we might return to town in the morning. You will remember I have patients to attend to.”