--The
conceit seemed to please the young fellow. If you will believe it,
when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it
out as follows. You know those odious little "saas-plates" that
figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns,
into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre
of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel
homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery
tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub,--
(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are
of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean
bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or "lucent syrups tinct with
cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the Tower-
stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy,--as people in the green stage
of millionism will have them,--I can dally with their amber semi-
fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,)--you know these
small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down the next morning,
each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf.
On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black
huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was
covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was
covered with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and
then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the
old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna
handkerchief
- "What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for
Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer.
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