HONEST Dietrich was in no such hurry. A rational, moral, pious man,
with a due grateful sense of the sapidity of certain gifts of the
Creator, ought not to swallow them with the post-haste indifference
of a sow swilling her wash; and as Dietrich Doppeldick did not taste
oysters once in ten years, it was a sort of religious obligation,
as well as a positive secular temptation, that the relish of each
particular fish should be prolonged as far as possible on the palate by
an orderly, decorous, and deliberate deglutition. Accordingly, instead
of bolting the oysters as if he had been swallowing them for a wager,
he sate soberly, with his eyes fixed on the two plumpest, as if only
awaiting the “good-night” of his guest to do ample and Christian-like
justice to the edible forget-me-nots of his good friend Adam Kloot. In
vain his wife looked hard at him, and trod on his toes as long as she
could reach them, besides being seized with a short hectic cough that
was any thing but constitutional--
“Lord, help me!” said Mrs. Doppeldick in her soul, too fluttered to
attend to the correctness of her metaphors--“It’s as easy to catch the
eye of a post!--He minds me no more than if I trod on the toes of a
stock-fish! I might as well cough into the ears of a stone wall.”
In fact, honest Dietrich had totally forgotten the domestic dilemma.
[Illustration: “KISSING GOES BY FAVOUR.”]
“He will never take his eyes off,” thought Madame Doppeldick, stealing
a glance across the table; “I was never so stared at, never since
I was a girl and wore pigtails! I expect every moment he will jump
and embrace me.” Whereas nothing could be further from the Captain’s
thought. The second battalion had joined that very morning, and
accordingly he had kissed, or been kissed by, all its eight-and-twenty
officers, tall or short, fat or lean, fair or swarthy,--which was quite
kissing enough for a reasonable day’s ration. The truth is, he was
staring at himself. He had just, mentally, put on a new uniform, and
was looking with the back of his eyes at his own brilliant figure, as
a Captain in the Royal Guards. It was, however, a stare, outwardly,
at Madame Doppeldick, who took everything to herself, frogs, lace,
bullion, buttons, cuffs, collars, epaulettes, and the Deuce knows what
besides.
“I would to Heaven!” she wished, “he had never thought of going into
the army,--or at least that the Quarter-master had never taken it into
his stupid head to quarter him on us. Young gay Captains are very well
to flirt with, or to waltz with, but at my years and bulk waltzing is
quite out of the question!”
[Illustration: WALTZING TO A NEW AIR.]