Again Aunt Judy paused, and there was a looking hither and thither among the little ones, and a shuffling about on the small Derby chairs, while one or two pairs of eyes were suddenly turned to the fire, as if watching it relieved a certain degree of embarrassment which their owners began to experience.
“It is not every little boy or girl,” was Aunt Judy’s next remark, “who knows what the courses of a dinner are.”
“I don’t,” interposed No. 8, in a distressed voice, as if he had been deeply injured.
“Oh, you think not? Well, not by name, perhaps,” answered Aunt Judy. “But I will explain. The courses of a dinner are the different sorts of food, which follow each other one after the other, till dinner is what people call ‘over.’ Thus, supposing a dinner was to begin with pea-soup, as you have sometimes seen it do, you would expect when it was taken away to see some meat put upon the table, should you not?”
The little ones nodded assent.
“And after the meat was gone, you would expect pie or pudding, eh?”
They nodded assent again, and with a smile.
“And if after the pudding was carried away, you saw some cheese and celery arrive, it would not startle you very much, would it?”
The little ones did nothing but laugh.
“Very well,” pursued Aunt Judy, “such a dinner as we have been talking about consists of four courses. The soup course, the meat course, the pudding course, and the cheese course. And it was while one course was being carried out, and another fetched in, that the little Victims had to wait; and that was the dinner misery I spoke about, and a very grievous affair it was. Sometimes they had actually to wait several minutes, with nothing to do but to fidget on their chairs, lean backwards till they toppled over, or forward till some accident occurred at the table. And then, poor little things, if they ventured to get out their knuckle-bones for a game, or took to a little boxing amusement among themselves, or to throwing the salt in each other’s mugs, or pelting each other with bits of bread, or anything nice and entertaining, down came those merciless keepers on their innocent mirth, and the old stupid order went round for sitting upright and quiet. Nothing that I can say about it would be half as expressive as what the little Victims used to say themselves. They said that it was ‘so very hard.’