CHAPTER I.

THE TABLE-CLOTH IS SPREAD.


Our theory has always been, "Eat lightly in the evening." While,
therefore, morning and noon there is bountifulness, we do not have much
on our tea-table but dishes and talk. The most of the world's work
ought to be finished by six o'clock p.m. The children are home from
school. The wife is done mending or shopping. The merchant has got
through with dry-goods or hardware. Let the ring of the tea-bell be
sharp and musical. Walk into the room fragrant with Oolong or Young
Hyson. Seat yourself at the tea-table wide enough apart to have room to
take out your pocket-handkerchief if you want to cry at any pitiful
story of the day, or to spread yourself in laughter if some one
propound an irresistible conundrum.

The bottle rules the sensual world, but the tea-cup is queen in all the
fair dominions. Once this leaf was very rare, and fifty dollars a pound;
and when the East India Company made a present to the king of two pounds
and two ounces, it was considered worth a mark in history. But now Uncle
Sam and his wife every year pour thirty million pounds of it into their
saucers. Twelve hundred years ago, a Chinese scholar by the name of Lo Yu
wrote of tea, "It tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels
lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness,
lightens and refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties." Our
own observation is that there is nothing that so loosens the hinge of the
tongue, soothes the temper, exhilarates the diaphragm, kindles sociality
and makes the future promising. Like one of the small glasses in the wall
of Barnum's old museum, through which you could see cities and mountains