So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-cheeked apple from her husband’s hand in requital of her predecessor’s fatal gift to our common grandfather. She eats it without sin, and, let us hope, with no disastrous consequences to her future progeny. They make a plentiful, yet temperate, meal of fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise, is legitimately derived from the seeds that were planted there. Their primal appetite is satisfied.
“What shall we drink, Eve?” inquires Adam.
Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they contain fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench thirst. But never before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume, excite such disgust as now.
“Pah!” she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. “What stuff is here? The beings who have gone before us could not have possessed the same nature that we do; for neither their hunger nor thirst were like our own.”
“Pray hand me yonder bottle,” says Adam. “If it be drinkable by any manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it.”
After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but is frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it upon the floor. There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they would have experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether excited by moral or physical causes, man sought to recompense himself for the calm, life-long joys which he had lost by his revolt from nature. At length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills. Both drink; and such refreshment does it bestow, that they question one another if this precious liquid be not identical with the stream of life within them.
“And now,” observes Adam, “we must again try to discover what sort of a world this is, and why we have been sent hither.”
“Why? to love one another,” cries Eve. “Is not that employment enough?”
“Truly is it,” answers Adam, kissing her; “but still—I know not—something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our allotted task is no other than to climb into the sky, which is so much more beautiful than earth.”
“Then would we were there now,” murmurs Eve, “that no task or duty might come between us!”