k their hats, lit fresh cigars, and slowly sauntered
towards the river. Karl turned back for a moment, to order the waggon to
be at the dock by ten o'clock; and, after sending forward two of his men
who were to act as boatmen, joined his friends.

The dinner hour of Karl Benson was the hour at which the leading members
of New-York society, in the ordinary routine of life, sat down to their
respective tables--that is, three o'clock. It is singular how this
important period recedes from the meridian as people grow more refined
in their own opinions, or more fashionable in those of their neighbors.
The hard-working farmer or mechanic has his dinner at the matin hour of
twelve; the country doctor or village lawyer stands upon his dignity
and dines at one; in country towns, of twenty or thirty thousand
inhabitants, the "good society" feels obliged to dine at two; when you
reach the great metropolis ("which is American penny-a-liner for"
New-York), you find the dinner postponed to three; and some gentlemen,
with English education and English habits, dine in New-York at five;
while others, whose business keeps them at the bank, or court, or
counting-house till three, have the witching time adjourned to four.
These are, however, only exceptions to the rule, and as lawyers say,
_exceptio probat regulam_; the legitimate, healthy, fashionable hour for
dining--that in which the Knickerbockers, who know no banks or
counting-houses, or dusty courts, save through checks, friends, and
lawyers, dine, is three. Modern degeneracy or refinement, or both, it is
whispered, have lately carried it to half-past, but on the day of which
we write it was precisely three.

To return from this digression to our history--which, as the reader has
doubtless observed, is not a vulgar description of fictitious persons
and imaginary circumstances, but a veracious chronicle of facts, and
much above the level of ordinary romances, inasmuch as truth is always
stranger than fiction--the early dining hour of the aristocratic Benson
(early in an English sense, of course we mean), enabled the three
gentlemen to step out on the lawn just as the sun was sinking behind the
Kaatskills. After a good dinner, most intellectual men become, or are
apt to become, sentimental; and as Ashburner and the Bensons were to the
best of their belief eminently intellectual, they of course became so,
as in duty bound; for every one is under obligations to conform to the
settled usa