A Return Dinner! Thirty people of all sorts and sizes, jammed--glued together--shoulder to shoulder--knee to knee--all with their elbows in each other's stomachs--most faces as red as fire, in spite of all those floods of perspiration--two landed gentlemen from the Highlands--a professor--four officers, naval and military, in his Majesty's and in the Company's service--some advocates--two persons like ministers--abundance of W.S.'s of course--an accoucheur--old ladies with extraordinary things upon their heads, and grey hair dressed in a mode fashionable before the flood--a few fat mothers of promising families--some eldest daughters now nubile--a female of no particular age, with a beard--two widows, the one buxom and blooming, with man-fond eyes, the other pale and pensive, with long, dark eye-lashes, and lids closed as if to hide a tear--there they all sit steaming through three courses--well does the right hand of the one know what the left hand of the other is doing--there is much suffering, mingled with much enjoyment--for though hot, they are hungry--while all idea of speaking having been, from the commencement of the feast, unanimously abandoned--you might imagine yourself at an anniversary GAUDEAMUS of the Deaf and Dumb.--_Blackwood's Mag._
To dine on devils without drinking, To want a seat when almost sinking, To pay to-day--receive to-morrow, To sit at feasts in silent sorrow, To sweat in winter--in the boot To feel the gravel cut one's foot, Or a cursed flea within the stocking Chase up and down--are very shocking: With one hand dirty, one hand clean, Or with one slipper to be seen: To be detain'd when most in hurry, Might put Griselda in a flurry;-- But these, and every other bore, If to the list you add a score, Are not so bad, upon my life, As that one scourge--a scolding wife!
Ledyard was one of the marines who were present at Cook's death, of which he gives an account (as appears from extracts of his journal already mentioned,) somewhat different from that in the authentic narrative of the voyage--and different, also, we must add, from his own private journal, which, at least the portion of it relating to that event, is still in the Admiralty. It must be mentioned in favour of Ledyard's sagacity, that the visit to Nootka Sound suggested to him the commercial advantages to be derived from a trade between the north-west coast of America and China; and the views which he took of this subject very much influenced the succeeding events of his life.