bald
heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and showing
like dim, decollete angels to the bleared vision raised to them from the
floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and speaking
have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds of tobacco
and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether they abuse the
chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height,
where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear them softly
gasping, gently coughing.

It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner has
recorded her bird's-eye impression of it at the interesting moment when
their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and
all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and
it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of
projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various
figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one
another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or
planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless
monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables
slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and the speakers sit
must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in bed.

What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and looking
down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration? Does it
seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization? To their
"finer female sense," what is the appeal of that evanescing spectacle,
as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the clapping of hands
rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the
oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal intelligences as
the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we may have still the
hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them the splendid and
graceful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of the next
day's papers.

The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the mellowed
tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those courses of
meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the
morning following, he wakes "high sorrowful and cloyed," and has not yet
read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it
is apt rather to be ba