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- drinking, good feeling, and good talk. We were a band of brothers.
Comfort--fraternal, household comfort, was the grand trait of the
affair. Also, you could plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no
wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were
travellers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any
twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fireside.
The thing called pain, the bugbear styled trouble--those two legends
seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations. How could men of
liberal sense, ripe scholarship in the world, and capacious
philosophical and convivial understandings--how could they suffer
themselves to be imposed upon by such monkish fables? Pain! Trouble! As
well talk of Catholic miracles. No such thing.--Pass the sherry,
sir.--Pooh, pooh! Can’t be!--The port, sir, if you please. Nonsense;
don’t tell me so.--The decanter stops with you, sir, I believe.
And so it went.
Not long after the cloth was drawn our host glanced significantly upon
Socrates, who, solemnly stepping to a stand, returned with an immense
convolved horn, a regular Jericho horn, mounted with polished silver,
and otherwise chased and curiously enriched; not omitting two lifelike
goats’ heads, with four more horns of solid silver, projecting from
opposite sides of the mouth of the noble main horn.
Not having heard that our host was a performer on the bugle, I was
surprised to see him lift this horn from the table, as if he were about
to blow an inspiring blast. But I was relieved from this, and set quite
right as touching the purposes of the horn, by his now inserting his
thumb and forefinger into its mouth; whereupon a slight aroma was
stirred up, and my nostrils were greeted with the smell of some choice
Rappee. It was a mull of snuff. It went the rounds. Capital idea this,
thought I, of taking snuff about this juncture. This goodly fashion must
be introduced among my countrymen at home, further ruminated I.
The remarkable decorum of the nine bachelors--a decorum not to be
affected by any quantity of wine--a decorum unassailable by any degree
of mirthfulness--this was again set in a forcible light to me, by now
observing that, though they took snuff very freely, yet not a man so far
violated the proprieties, or so far molested the invalid bachelor in the
adjoining room, as to indulge himself in a sneeze. The snuff was snuffed
silently, as if it had been some fine innoxious powder brushed off the
wings of butterflies.
But fine though they be, bachelors’ dinners, like bachelors’ lives,
cannot endure forever. The time came for breaking up. One by one the
bachelors took their hats, and two by two and arm-in-arm they descended,
still conversing, to the flagging of the court; some going to their
neighbouring chambers to turn over the _Decameron_ ere retiring for the
night; some to smoke a cigar, promenading in the garden on the cool
river-side; some to make for the street, call a hack, and be driven
snugly to their distant lodgings.
I was the last lingerer.
‘Well,’ said my smiling host, ‘what do you think of the Temple here, and
the sort of life we bachelors make out to live in it?’
‘Sir,’ said I, with a burst of admiring candour--‘Sir, this is the very
Paradise of Bachelors!’
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