peasants of all ages and both sexes, and the good fathers, more than
ever distracted, were incapable of helping us. Seeing a great crowd
piled up against a rear basement-door, we descended the stairs, and
groped our way through manifold steams and noises to a huge succession
of kitchens, where caldrons of cabbage were bubbling, and shoals of fish
went in raw and came out cooked. In another room some hundreds of
peasants were eating with all the energy of a primitive appetite. Soup
leaked out of the bowls as if they had been sieves; fishes gave a whisk
of the tail and vanished; great round boulders of bread went off, layer
after layer, and still the empty plates were held up for more. It was
_grand_ eating,--pure appetite, craving only food in a general sense: no
picking out of tidbits, no spying here and there for a favorite dish,
but, like a huge fire, devouring everything that came in its way. The
stomach was here a patient, unquestioning serf, not a master full of
whims, requiring to be petted and conciliated. So, I thought, people
must have eaten in the Golden Age: so Adam and Eve must have dined,
before the Fall made them epicurean and dyspeptic.

We--degenerate through culture--found the steams of the strong, coarse
dishes rather unpleasant, and retreated by a back-way, which brought us
to a spiral staircase. We ascended for a long time, and finally emerged
into the garret of the building, hot, close, and strawy as a barn-loft.
It was divided into rooms, in which, on the floors covered deep with
straw, the happy pilgrims who had finished their dinner were lying on
their bellies, lazily talking themselves to sleep. The grassy slope in
front of the house, and all the neighboring heights, were soon covered
in like manner. Men, women, and children threw themselves down, drawing
off their heavy boots, and dipping their legs, knee-deep, into the sun
and air. An atmosphere of utter peace and satisfaction settled over
them.