a suggestive voice calling us from the front-door of the mansion-house of Damville, and “Supper” was the cry.
A call to the table may quell and may awaken romance. When, in some abode of poetized luxury, the “silver knell” sounds musically six, and a door opens toward a glitter that is not pewter and Wedgewood, and, with a being fair and changeful as a sunset cloud upon my arm, I move under the archway of blue curtains toward the asphodel and the nectar, then, O Reader! O Friend! romance crowds into my heart, as color and fragrance crowd into a rose-bud. Joseph Bourgogne, cook at Damville on Moosetocmaguntic, could not offer us such substitute for æsthetic emotions. But his voice of an artist created a winning picture half veiled with mists, evanescent and affectionate, such as linger fondly over Pork-and-Beans.
Fancied joy soon to become fact. We entered the barrack. Beneath its smoky roof-tree was a pervading aroma; near the centre of that aroma, a table dim with wefts of incense; at the innermost centre of that aroma and that incense, and whence those visible and viewless fountains streamed, was their source, — a Dish of Pork-and-Beans.
Topmostly this. There were lesser viands, buttresses to this towering triumph. Minor smokes from minor censers. A circle of little craterlings about the great crater, — of little fiery cones about that great volcanic dome in the midst, unopened,
