a table slightly intoxicated.

Our beautiful china, moreover, began to have little chipped places in
the edges, most unusual and distressing to our eyes; the handles
vanished from our teacups, and here and there a small mouthful
appeared to be bitten out of the nose of some pretty fancy pitchers,
which had been the delight of my eyes.

Now, if there is anything which I specially affect, it is a refined
and pretty table arrangement, and at our house for years and years
such had prevailed. All of us had rather a weakness for china, and the
attractions of the fragile world, as presented in the great
crockery-stores, had been many times too much for our prudence and
purse. Consequently we had all sorts of little domestic idols of the
breakfast and dinner table,--Bohemian-glass drinking-mugs of antique
shape, lovely bits of biscuit choicely moulded in classic patterns,
beauties, oddities, and quaintnesses in the way of especial teacups
and saucers, devoted to different members of the family, wherein each
took a particular and individual delight. Our especial china or glass
pets of the table often started interesting conversations on the state
of the plastic arts as applied to every-day life, and the charm of
being encircled, even in the material act of feeding our mortal
bodies, with a sort of halo of art and beauty.

All this time none of us ever thought in how great degree our feeling
for elegance and refinement owed its gratification at the hour of
meals to the care, the tidiness, and neat handling of our now lost and
wedded Alice.

Nothing presents so forlorn an appearance as battered and neglected
finery of any kind; and elegant pitchers with their noses knocked off,
cut glass with cracked edges, and fragments of artistic teacups and
saucers on a tumbled tablecloth, have a peculiarly dismal appearance.
In fact, we had really occasion to wonder at the perfectly weird and
bewitched effect which one of our two Hibernian successors to the
pretty Alice succeeded in establishing in our table department. Every
caprice in the use and employment of dishes, short of serving cream in
the gravy-boats and using the sugar-bowl for pickled oysters and the
cream-pitcher for vinegar, seemed possible and permissible. My horror
was completed one morning on finding a china hen, artistically
represented as brooding on a nest, made to cover, not boiled eggs, but
a lot of greasy hash, over which she sat so that her head and tail
bewilde