A recent traveller thus describes a dinner party at Mendoza:--The day of
days arrived; the carriage was flying about the town with a couple of
mules, to bring all the ladies to dinner, in order to meet the foreign
gentlemen. We were all seated higgledy-piggledy at table, dish after dish
came in; every one helped themselves, no carving was required, being all
made dishes. The master of the house was walking round the room with his
coat off, very comfortably smoking his cigar, and between every fresh dish,
of which there were some thirty or forty, the ladies amused themselves
with eating olives soaked in oil, and the colonel, (one of the military
pedlars), to prove that he understood foreign manners and customs, got the
ladies one after another to ask the foreign gentlemen to drink wine with
them, which was no small ordeal for us to run through. After these half
hundred dishes, came the sweets; then the gentlemen's flints and steels
were going, the room soon filled with smoke, and the ladies retired to
dress for the ball.
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