When it was dinner-time, we took tt reclining, both chairs and couches standing ready. A joint-stock meal it was, and the contributions many and various. Pigs’ pettitoes, ribs of beef, paunch and pregnant womb of sow, fried liver lobe, garlic paste, sauce piquante, mayonnaise, and so on; pastry, ramequins, and honeycakes. In the aquatic line, much of the cartilaginous, of the testaceous much; many a salt slice, basket-hawked, eels of Copae, fotols of the barn-door, a cock past crowing-days, and fish to keep him company; add to these a sheep, roast whole, and ox’s rump of toothless eld. The loaves were firsts, no common stuff, and therewithal remainders from the new moon; vegetables both radical and excrescent. For the wine, ’twas of no standing, but came from the skin; tts sweetness was gone, but its roughness remained.
On the dolphin-foot table stood divers store of cups; the eyeshutter, the ladle, slender-handled, genuine Mentor; crane-neck and gurgling bombyl; and many an earth-born child of Thericlean furnace, the wide-mouthed, the kindly-lipped; Phocaean, Cnidian work, but all light as air, and thin as eggshell; bowls and panntkins and posied cups; ob, ’twas a well-stocked sideboard.
