5. An arm-chair, and six chairs with plush seats, showing their stuffing through numerous wounds,—all of them venerable invalids, full of infirmities, and especially weak in the back.
6. A square table, with flaps which can be turned up; its upper surface painted green with white spots, and the edges reddish-brown. In the middle of this table we see a lamp and two black-japanned candlesticks with tallow candles in them; further, a broken pair of snuffers, a wooden tobacco-box, a brazier, and an inkstand with other writing materials; and round it are seated several students, all members of the “rhetorical chamber”[[22]] entitled, “The Thirsty Pleiades.”
J. Van Lennep.
The Vicissitudes of Klaasje Zevenster (1866).
A COLONIAL PRIZE-GIVING.
“Another day on the rack!” Heer Doornik had said that morning to his wife,—not however in so tragic a manner as the tenor of the ejaculation would seem to indicate, as he was just then busy pulling on a particularly intractable boot.
“Is your speech ready?” asked Mevrouw Doornik, in the act of fastening his necktie for him.
“Yes, my address is prepared,” he replied, solemnly.
You must know, reader, that Doornik had been, in his young days, a member of a “rhetorical chamber” at Dinxperlo or Buren, I do not exactly remember which, and had reaped harvests of laurels at various lectures—laurels offered to him along with cups of muddy chocolate and cadetjes with cream cheese.
This circumstance had stood in his way all his life. The man, whose manifest destiny was to become a schoolmaster, believed himself a second Mirabeau. He would have liked to become a popular orator, or a member of the Second Chamber, or failing that at least a minister. But his ideals had gone the way of the cadetjes and the chocolate, they had vanished into nothingness; the future Mirabeau became, first, a pupil in a training-college, then third, and then second master; and, at last, with much labour, he gained his head-mastership.