Tableland

“ And then the country tavern, whose long shed and sanded hall give surety to the stranger and his beast of a comfortable noon-tide baiting; or, in the more solitary townships, where the places of entertainment are few and far between, the quiet nook by the forest road-side, where the dipper hangs beside the overflowing water-trough, and the guide-board measures out the long miles between him and his evening resting-place; each and all objects of pleasant recollection to the traveller, as he muses upon his journeyings in after life. ”

“ Those who go into the country looking for summer board in farmhouses know perfectly well that a table where the butter is always fresh, the tea and coffee of the best kinds and well made, and the meats properly kept, dressed, and served, is the one table of a hundred, the fabulous enchanted island. It seems impossible to get the idea into the minds of people that what is called common food, carefully prepared, becomes, in virtue of that very care and attention, a delicacy, superseding the necessity of artificially compounded dainties. ”

“ GATE-LEGGED AND DINING TABLES
SINCE the days of King Arthur, a table, and particularly a dining table, has been synonymous with royalty. Often to dine with a man is to make him your friend. The table, perhaps, more than any piece of furniture, serves to bring people into a closer relation and better understanding of each other, and of affairs as well. The interests of the American colonists were few, and they depended, to a great extent, on what they received in the way of pleasure, in their homes and from each other. ”

“ Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm. “I see papa!” sang out little M. “How are the children?” hailed papa from the quay. “All well!” And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station. ”

“ Thanks to the efforts of upwards of ten human beings—counting laundresses, gardeners, cooks, kitchen-maids, butlers and footmen—the table was sumptuously laid for eight, with silver waterjugs, decanters, kvass, wine, mineral waters, cut glass, and fine table linen, while two men-servants were continually hurrying to and fro, bringing in and serving, and then clearing away the hors d’oeuvre and the various hot and cold courses. ”

“ The tailor inspected it on all sides and said, “Thou didst not make a masterpiece when thou mad’st that; it is a bad old table.” “But it is a table which furnishes itself,” replied the son. “When I set it out, and tell it to cover itself, the most beautiful dishes stand on it, and a wine also, which gladdens the heart. Just invite all our relations and friends, they shall refresh and enjoy themselves for once, for the table will give them all they require.” ”

“ In a deep valley, on the other side of the Monto, we stopped at a wayside tavern, in which we found an intelligent-looking man, and a boy, who were refreshing themselves with wine and bread and cheese. ”

“ On the contrary, there are many tables where the closest economy is practised, and yet the table-cloth is so white and smooth, the dishes, silver, glass, and other table articles so bright, and arranged with such propriety, the bread so white, light, and sweet, the butter so beautiful, and every other article of food so well cooked, and so neatly and tastefully served, that everything seems good, and pleases both the eye and the palate. ”

“ People eat and drink here the whole day long; table is covered after table; one meal-time relieves another. Everything is rich and splendid. Yes, here we live really magnificently; but I do not like this superabundance, and the eternally long dinners are detestable to me; all the more so sitting against a wall between two gentlemen, who are as still as mice, and do nothing but eat, although one of them, an Englishman, might converse very well if he would. ”

“ I'll keep a little tavern
⁠Below the high hill's crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
⁠May set them down and rest.
There shall be plates a-plenty,
⁠And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
⁠Who happen up the hill. ”

“ We entered Table Bay in the night, just in time to escape a strong south-easter that sprung up at daybreak, enveloped the Table Mountain with its dense white cloth of clouds, and sent volumes of dust from the flats pouring into the town, to the blinding of every unfortunate out-of-door individual. On disembarking in any foreign land, one is naturally amused with the curious costumes of the people ”

“ On the heavy, rough-hewn table there are wooden platters in which each man receives his share as it is taken out of the cooking pot, and a wooden spoon lies by each. This is all the furniture of the bare room; but such as it is, to the suffering, storm-lashed woman it is full of unspeakable comfort--a city of refuge from the raging wilderness without. ”

“ You will set one round table on the porch, so that if it threatens rain, as it sometimes does, you know, in England, people will not be afraid to sit down; and the other you will put under the yew-tree near the gate. The tables must be immaculate; no spotted, rumpled cloths and chipped cups at Comfort Cottage, which is to be a strictly first-class tea station. You will put vases of flowers on the tables, and you will not mix red, yellow, purple, and blue ones in the same vase-”
“It's the way the good Lord mixes 'em in the fields,” interjected Mrs. Bobby piously. ”

“ As usual, every one you look at puts out the hand to beg. The tavern where we stopped to dine seemed more like a great barn, or cavern, than any thing else. We go groping along perfectly dark stone passages, stumbling up a stone staircase, and gaining light only when the door of a kind of reception room opens upon us—a long, rough-looking room, without any carpet, furnished with a table, and some chairs, and a rude sofa. ”

“ In these retired places the tavern is first of all a house—elsewhere, last of all, or never,—and warms and shelters its inhabitants. It is as simple and sincere in its essentials as the caves in which the first men dwelt, but it is also as open and public. ”

“ Although everything was of the plainest sort, the long table with the white cloth and greens from the pine trees the boys had cut as they came along, and the wild flowers we had gathered and placed in bowls to grace the tables with the greens which were arranged tastefully in wreaths and festoons, gave a homelike welcome to these men who for months had not eaten a home dinner or enjoyed the society of women. ”

“ Generally, when you enter a country tavern of a summer's noon, you find some miserable creature besotting himself on a bench behind the table, half asleep over his stale beer or schnapps, who will stare at every new-comer, and brag and rail in some unintelligible fashion. ”

“ In the ever-green foliage of these it stands inwoven, as with its own network of ivy. Other countries, even older than England, have had their taverns from time immemorial; but they are all kept in the background of human life. ”

“ It is a new experience to enter an adobe hut for breakfast, but traveling is intended for new experiences. So hunger drives me to the white table-cloth, the clean earth floor, and the bill of fare. A brisk and pleasant lady serves the table, assisted by a not so brisk or pleasant, but much older, man. ”

“ And, when the table, which has borne so well some twenty thousand dinners, shall be broken up from pure debility and consigned to the fire, thence it will issue into the atmosphere once more as carbonic acid, again to be devoured by the nearest troop of hungry vegetables—green peas or cabbages in a London market-garden, say—to be daintily served on the table which now stands in that other table's place, and where they will speedily go to the making of "lords of the creation." ”

“ The tavern was by way of being an ancient one, for the oak props were blackened with age and the upper storeys jutted out one above the other, in the way our forefathers were used to build in walled towns, where every foot of space was of account. ”

“ They had passed the evening at the tavern drinking and roaring, for a tavern is like a free port, and no one can be sent out of it as long as they have money to pay their score and to rattle in their pockets. ”

“ On the outside of the tavern, whither we betake ourselves to wash, are a tub of water, a basin and a towel, for all the guests; but as only one person can perform his ablutions at a time, it will be necessary for us to form ourselves in a line, and take our turn—the first comers being entitled to the front places. We are now ready to replenish the inner man. The bar is convenient for those who wish to imbibe. Breakfast is announced. We seat ourselves at the table. Before us is a reasonable quantity of beans, pork and flapjacks, served up in tin plates. ”

“ The tavern, it must be remembered, as a convivial resort, is the social antipodes of the back room of Squire Edwards' “store.” If you would consort with silk-stockinged, wigged, and silver shoe-buckled gentlemen, you must just step over there, for at the tavern are only to be found the hewers of wood and drawers of water, mechanics, farm-laborers, and farmers. ”

“ Grateful for the invitation:
"Never do I court strange tables,
Though the food be rare and toothsome;
One's own country is the dearest,
One's own table is the sweetest,
One's own home, the most attractive. ”

“ Foote, although uninstructed, could play skilfully. There were round tables and square tables, and writing tables; and there were side tables with statuettes, and Swiss carvings, and old china, and gold apostle-spoons, and lava ware, and Etruscan vases, and a swarm of Spiers's elegant knick-knackeries. ”

“ A word concerning reaching at table, for your guidance, my dear mother, when next you find yourself at a table d’hote. I calculate that for this method of helping one’s self there is a wrong way and a right. Imagine yourself beside a busy person beyond whom lies the wished-for dish. If you reach with the arm nearest the dish, your arm goes across your neighbor’s plate, a fact which my neighbors have frequently proved to me. But if you reach with the arm furthest from the dish you will not cross his plate, your body swinging your arm in over the table. ”

“ We have to-day scores of places of amusement, and means of amusement, where in earlier days all diversions centred at the tavern. The furnishing of food and shelter to travellers and to horses, and of liquid comfort to neighbors, was not the only function of the tavern, nor the meeting for cheerful interchange of news and sentiment. Whatever there was of novelty in entertainment or instruction, was delivered at the tavern, and it served as the gathering place for folk on scores of duties or pleasures bent. ”

“ The supper was fantastically rural. The table was spread under a large tree, from the branches of which was trailed a vine, by a square frame of lattice-work in the proportions of a pretty saloon. The lamps were hung in coloured lanterns among the branches, and the trunk of the tree passed through the centre of the table hollowed to receive it. ”

“ The tops of all tables at all taverns are, and have been from time immemorial, remarkable for an infinite number of indentations varying in size and conformation. This peculiarity is not indigenous to the aforesaid tables; they are supposed, at some distant period of their existence, to have had faces as unruffled as others of their kind; but the eternal succession of thumps from glasses, plates, knives and forks, approbatory of speech, sentiment, or song, furrows their physiognomy with deep, ineffaceable lines,—albeit neither of study, thought, nor sorrow. ”

“ If our readers will follow the master of the week as he makes his round of the tea-tables at a quarter to seven on a winter evening, he will witness a cheerful scene not wanting in picturesqueness. The vista of the corridor is filled with three very long and very narrow tables, and the boys of as many houses seated at them. ”

“ Then, for a crowd began to gather round them, wearily enough they turned up another street at hazard. Thus they wended their way back toward the great central rock, thinking that there they might find some more hospitable tavern. ”

“ When meal time comes, the family does not gather around the table, for as I told you, there are no seats that can be moved. They sit on the benches, and the table is therefore kept in the corner of the room. ”

“ Yes; much more fearfully and wonderfully made, already, is the table, as it stands now, nothing but a piece of dead deal wood, than if, as foxes say, and geese believe, spirits could make it dance, or talk to you by rapping on it. ”

“ No ladies of high degree now sip their tea beneath their shade, with liveried servants about the slender-legged tables, as they did in the old days. There are tables, of course—a dozen in all, perhaps, some in white cloths and some in bare tops, bare of everything except the glass of beer—it depends very largely on what one orders, and who orders it—but the servants are missing unless you count Muffles and his stable-boy. ”

“ There travellers, soldiers and seamen could relate their wondrous adventures. There men of every class could mix and interchange opinions. "A tavern," says a contemporary, "is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker-away of a rainy day. ”