A seventh has just dropped in, and
calls for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is
once more trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain
fingers.
Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go
along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is
organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures, get
up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes -
suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-lit
dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light picks out
the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every vine-leaf on
the wall - sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready,
and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
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