and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including chicken-pies,
ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being placed in
their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was a vast
round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the sweets
were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine, not
including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all the
way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic
compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts
and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were
people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners
six or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually
ate and drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their
heads. The ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom
they were descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help
respecting such prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the
poverty-stricken class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a
very different thing when I lived there twenty years later, and though
port and Madeira were generally on the table, the only man whom I saw
habitually drink them was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason
the British got such a thrashing in South Africa the other day.

After dinner at Rock Park--or, if it were to be a late affair,
before--we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined.
This was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious,
but we had not before been accustomed to express our religious
feelings in just that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my
father would open the Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a
prayer-book containing thirty or forty well-considered addresses to
the Almighty, and everybody would kneel down and cover their eyes with
their hands. The "Amen" having been reached, and echoed by every one,