"Forbear to scoff at woes you cannot feel, Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal."--CRABBE.
The dietary tables at the chateau, conspicuous alike for the paucity and simplicity of the articles registered therein, are easily recalled to mind. The fare they exhibited was certainly _coarse_--though, by a euphemism, it might have been termed merely _plain_--and spare withal. The breakfast would consist of milk and water--the first aqueous enough without dilution, being the produce of certain ill-favoured, and, as we afterwards tasted their flesh, we may add ill-flavoured kine, whose impoverished lacteals could furnish out of their sorry fodder no better supplies. It was London sky-blue, in short, but not of the Alderney dairy, which was made to serve our turn at Yverdun. This milk, at seven in summer, and at half-past seven in winter, was transferred boiling, and as yet unadulterated, into earthenware mixers, which had been previously half-filled with hot water from a neighbouring kettle. In this half-and-half state it was baled out for the assembled school into a series of pewter platters, ranged along the sides of three bare deal boards, some thirty feet long by two wide, and mounted on tressels, which served us for tables. The ministering damsels were two great German Fraus, rejoicing severally in the pleasing names of Gretchen and Bessie. When Frau Gretchen, standing behind each boy, had dropt her allowance of milk over his right shoulder--during which process there was generally a mighty clatter for full measure and fair play--the other Frau was slicing off her slices of bread from a brown loaf a yard long, which she carried under her arm, and slashed clean through with wonderful precision and address. It was now for all those who had saved pocket-money for _menus-plaisirs_ to produce their _cornets_ of cinnamon or sugar, sprinkle a little into the milk, and then fall to sipping and munching with increased zest and satisfaction. So dry and chaffy was our _pain de ménage_ that none ventured to soak it entire, or at once, but would cut it into _frustrums_, and retain liquid enough to wash down the boluses separately. In a few minutes every plate was completely cleaned out and polished; and the cats, that generally entered the room as we left it, seldom found a drop with which they might moisten their tongues, or remove from cheeks and whiskers the red stains of murdered mice on which they had been breaking their fast in the great tower. So much for the earliest meal of the day, which was to carry us through five hours, if not of laborious mental study, at least of the incarceration of our bodies in class, which was equally irksome to them as if our minds had been hard at work. These five hours terminated, slates were once more insalivated and put by clean, and the hungry garrison began to look forward to the pleasures of the noon-day repast. The same bell that had been calling so often to class would now give premonitory notice of dinner, but in a greatly changed tone. In place of the shrill snappish key in which it had all the morning jerked out each short unwelcome summons from lesson to lesson, as if fearful of ringing one note beyond the prescribed minute, it now would take time, vibrate far and wide in its cage, give full scope to its tongue, and appear, from the loud increasing swell of its prolonged _oyez_, to announce the message of good cheer like a herald conscious and proud of his commission. Ding-dong!--come along! Dinner's dishing!--ding-dong! _Da capo_ and _encore_! Then, starting up from every school-room form throughout the chateau, the noisy boys rushed pell-mell, opened all the doors, and, like emergent bees in quest of honey, began coursing up and down right busily between the _salle-à-manger_ and the kitchen--snuffing the various aromas as they escaped from the latter into the passage, and inferring from the amount of exhaled fragrance the actual progress of the preparations for eating. Occasionally some "sly Tom" would peep into the kitchen, while the Fraus were too busy to notice him, and watch the great cauldron that had been milked dry of its stores in the morning, now discharging its aqueous contents of a much-attenuated _bouillon_--the surface covered with lumps of swimming bread, thickened throughout with a hydrate of potatoes, and coloured with coarse insipid carrots, which certainly gave it a savoury appearance. It was not good broth--far from it, for it was both _sub_-greasy and _super_-salted; but then it was hot, it was thick, and there was an abundant supply. It used to gush, as we have said, from the great stop-cock of the cauldron, steaming and sputtering, into eight enormous tureens.