Manners and Social Usages

by M. E. W. Sherwood

A high tea is served in courses like a dinner, excepting with less formality. The lady sits at one end of the table with the silver tea-tray before her, while the gentleman has before him cold chicken, or even, perhaps, a hot dish like roast partridges, to carve. Frequently scalloped oysters are passed, and always salads, so that those who are in the habit of dining at that hour have a solid meal. There are hot cakes and biscuits and sweetmeats on the table, so that it is really the old-fashioned tea of our grandmothers re-enforced by some solid dishes. It is intended to save the servants trouble on Sunday evening, but it is really more trouble to them as now served, as it gives the waiter additional dishes to wash, and quite as much service. It saves the cook, however.

CHAPTER XLII. FLORAL TRIBUTES AND DECORATIONS.

When every steamer leaving these shores goes out laden with people who are weighed down with flowers, it cannot but be a severe tax on the ingenuity of the florist to devise novel and appropriate forms for the typical basket that shall say bon voyage in a thousand new ways. Floral ships, anchors, stars, crosses, mottoes, monograms, and even the national flag, have been used for these steamer decorations.

But the language of flowers, so thoroughly understood among the Persians that a single flower expresses a complete declaration of love, an offer of marriage, and, presumably, a hint at the settlement, is, with our more practical visionaries and enthusiasts of the nineteenth century, rather an echo of the stock market than a poetical fancy. We fear that no prima donna looks at her flowers without a thought of how much they have cost, and that the belle estimates her bouquet according to the commercial value of a lily- of-the-valley as compared with that of a Jacqueminot rose, rather than as flowers simply. It is a pity that the overwhelming luxury of an extravagant period involves in its all-powerful grasp even the flowers of the field, those generous gifts of sunshine and of rain.

But so it is. It is a well-known fact that the lady who will give her order three months in advance for the flowers needed for her daughter's wedding, or for any other grand ceremonial, can, by offering a sufficiently large amount of money, command any flower she wishes. Even daisies and buttercups, red clover and white, the delicate forget-me-not of the garden, nasturtiums and marigolds, the shy and tender anemone, the dandelion and lilacs and lilies-of-the- valley, may be forced into unnatural bloom in January. It is a favorite caprice to put the field-flowers of June on a lunch-table in January.

This particular table is the greatest of all the consumers of flowers, therefore we may begin by describing some of the new fancies developed by that extraordinarily luxurious meal. A lady's lunch must show not only baskets of magnificent flowers up and down the table; but it must also bear a basket or a bouquet for each lady.

One of the most regal lunches, given to twenty-eight ladies, set the fashion for using little gilt baskets, with covers opening on either side of the handle—the kind of basket, of a larger size, in which, in New England and in Old England, Dame Trot carried her multifarious parcels home from market. These pretty and useful baskets had on each side a bunch of flowers peeping out through the open cover, and on the gilt handle was tied a ribbon corresponding in color to the flowers. One of them, having soft pink rosebuds of exceeding size and loveliness on one side and a bunch of lilies-of- the-valley on the other, with a bow of pink satin ribbon on the handle, was as pretty a picture as ever Kate Greenaway devised. Another, showing the strong contrast of purple pansies and yellow daffodils, and tied with a lovely purple satin ribbon, was a dream of rich color.

The stiff, formal, flat bouquets of yellow daffodils and bunches of violets, tied with purple ribbon, make a very fine effect laid in regular order at each plate. Repetition of a favorite idea in flowers is not ugly, although it seems at first very far from the primeval and delicious confusion in which nature throws her bouquets down upon upland and meadow.

In the arrangement of roses the most varied and whimsical fancies may be displayed, although the most gorgeous effect is produced, perhaps, by massing a single color or group. A basket of the pink Gloire de Paris, however, with its redundant green foliage, alternated with deep-red Jacqueminots, is a very splendid fancy, and will fill a room with fragrance. In February these roses cost two dollars apiece, and it was no rare sight to see four or six baskets, each containing forty roses, on one table during the winter of 1884.

We advise all ladies going into the country to purchase some of the little "Dame Trot" baskets, as they will be lovely when filled with wild-flowers during the summer. Indeed, the gilt basket, fitted with a tin pan to hold earth or water, is such a cheap and pretty receptacle for either growing or cut flowers that it ought to be a belonging of every dinner-table.