Dinner being now ready, they all sat down to a copious, if not a very dainty meal; and the priest, who just before had asked a blessing upon the friends, was the most honoured of all the guests.
They ate heartily, and many toasts were drunk in honour of the two young men, and those that could made speeches in rhyme to them.
The feast was interrupted by the Kolo—a young man performing sundry evolutions with a decanter of wine upon his head, looking all the while as clumsy as Heine's famous bear, Atta Troll.
Then they began again to eat and drink, and filled themselves up in such a way that they could hardly move from the table any more, so that by the time St. Nicholas' Day came to an end, the hosts and almost all the guests were snoring in happy oblivion.
CHAPTER III
CHRISTMAS EVE
The fierce equinoctial blasts which that year had lasted for more than a month, were followed by a fortnight of fitful, heavy rain, intermitted by sudden gales and stormy showers. Then after a period of dull, drizzling, foggy weather, ending in a thick squall, the clouds cleared up beautifully, the sun showed itself again, and Spring apparently succeeded to Autumn.
The wind fell entirely. Not the slightest breeze was blowing to bring down the dry leaves, or to bicker the smooth surface of the waters. For days and days the sea remained as even as a mass of shining melted lead, with the only difference that it was as fathomably liquid and as diaphanously pure as the air itself, of which it even had the vaporous cerulean clearness. Far away on the offing, the waters blended with the watchet airiness of the surrounding atmosphere, so that the line of the horizon could nowhere be seen, the blueish-grey ocean melting into the greyish-blue of the sky. Nearer the shore, the smooth translucent sheet was streaked and spotted with those sheeny stripes and silvery patches, which Shelley terms a "coil of crystalline streams."
The earth itself had a fleecy look. The shadowy opal greys of the headlands, the liquid amethystine tints of the hills, the light irradiated coasts, all rising out of the luminous waves, looked lovelier even than they had done in summer, at noontide, when swathed by a splendent haziness, for now the cold opaque clay tints themselves looked transparent, wrapped up as they were in that vaporous pellucid veil of mists.
Nature was wearing now her garishly gorgeous autumnal garment, and the foliage of the trees had acquired the richest prismatic dyes, for the reddish russets and the glowing orange yellows predominated over the whitish blues and the faint greens. The vegetation, but for the funereal cypresses, had the sere hectic hue of dying life.