The dining-hall was superb and the table exquisite. The china was of
the very finest manufactured for dolls, and a multitude of bouquets
showed their colors and scattered their fragrance from egg-stands
and thimbles. Pacorrito sat at the princess's right. They began to
eat. The parrots and paper birds waited upon them with such order
and rapidity that they seemed like soldiers drilling before their
general. The dishes were delicious. Everything was raw, or at all
events cold. Migajas was rather pleased with the supper at first, but
he was soon surfeited. The menu was as follows: bits of sponge cake,
turkeys smaller than birds, which one could swallow at a mouthful,
gilt-heads no bigger than almonds, a rich supply of hemp-seed, a pâté
of bird-seed à la Canaria, bread-crumb à la perdigona, a fricassée
of pheasants' eyes with a sauce of wild mulberries, a salad of moss,
delicious sweetmeats, and every possible variety of fruit, harvested
by the parrots from the tapestries where they were embroidered, the
melons being as small as grapes and the grapes as small as lentils.
During the supper the company chattered ceaselessly,--all but
Migajas, who, being short of wit, sat there and said never a word.
He was confused in the presence of so many gold-corded and uniformed
generals. He was amazed, too, at finding so much loquacity and
frolicsomeness in these great men, who had stood stiff and dumb in
the show-window as though they were made of clay.
The one known as Bismarck, in particular, never stopped to draw
breath. He said the wildest things imaginable, pounded the table with
his fist, and threw bread balls at the princess. He flung his arms
about most marvellously, just as though a string were attached to
their hinges, and somebody under the table had hold of it.
"What fun I am having!" said the chancellor. "My dear princess, when
a man spends his life adorning a mantel-piece in the cheerful company
of a clock, a bronze figure, and a pot of begonias, he really needs
recreation; and at a festival like this he lays in a supply of mirth
for the year."
"Ah, happy, a thousand times happy, they whose only duty consists
in adorning mantelpieces!" said the lady, in melancholy tones. "It
may be wearisome, but you do not at least suffer as we do,--we whose
lives are a prolonged martyrdom; we, the toys of the small men. It
would be impossible for me to make you understand, Prince Bismarck,
what we suffer when one pulls our right arm, another our left; when
this one cracks our head, that one quarters us or leaves us in the
water to soak, or rips us open to find out what is inside of us!"
"I can imagine it," said the chancellor, opening his arms and
clapping them together several times.
"How unfortunate!" said Espartero and two of the emperors at once.
"I was the least unfortunate of all," said the lady, "for I found
a friend and protector in the valorous and faithful Migajas, who
managed to save me from the barbarous torture."
Pacorrito blushed to the very roots of his hair.
"Valorous and faithful!" repeated all the dolls, in admiring chorus.
"And therefore to-night, when our Genius Creator permits us to come
together for this great celebration, I chose to honor him by bringing
him with me and offering him my hand as a sign of alliance and
reconciliation between the lineage of dolls and that of well-bred,
compassionate children."