When we assembled at eight, the drawing of the lots had no longer any interest or suspense, so far as I was concerned.I had read my last story, and it now only remained for chance to decide the question of precedency between Owen and Morgan.Of the two numbers left in the bowl, the one drawn was Nine.This made it Morgan's turn to read, and left it appropriately to Owen, as our eldest brother, to close the proceedings on the next night.
Morgan looked round the table when he had spread out his manuscript, and seemed half inclined to open fire, as usual, with a little preliminary sarcasm; but his eyes met mine; he saw the anxiety I was suffering; and his natural kindness, perversely as he might strive to hide it, got the better of him.He looked down on his paper; growled out briefly, "No need for a preface; my little bit of writing explains itself; let's go on and have don e with it," and so began to read without another word from himself or from any of us.
BROTHER MORGAN'S STORY
of FAUNTLEROY.
IT was certainly a dull little dinner-party.Of the four guests, two of us were men between fifty and sixty, and two of us were youths between eighteen and twenty, and we had no subjects in common.We were all intimate with our host, but were only slightly acquainted with each other.Perhaps we should have got on better if there had been some ladies among us; but the master of the house was a bachelor, and, except the parlor-maids who assisted in waiting on us at dinner, no daughter of Eve was present to brighten the dreary scene.
We tried all sorts of subjects, but they dropped one after the other.The elder gentlemen seemed to be afraid of committing themselves by talking too freely within hearing of us juniors, and we, on our side, restrained our youthful flow of spirits and youthful freedom of conversation out of deference to our host, who seemed once or twice to be feeling a little nervous about the continued propriety of our behavior in the presence of his respectable guests.To make matters worse, we had dined at a sensible hour.When the bottles made their first round at dessert, the clock on the mantel-piece only struck eight.Icounted the strokes, and felt certain, from the expression of his face, that the other junior guest, who sat on one side of me at the round table, was counting them also.When we came to the final eight, we exchanged looks of despair."Two hours more of this! What on earth is to become of us?" In the language of the eyes, that was exactly what we said to each other.
The wine was excellent, and I think we all came separately and secretly to the same conclusion--that our chance of getting through the evening was intimately connected with our resolution in getting through the bottles.
As a matter of course, we talked wine.No company of Englishmen can assemble together for an evening without doing that.Every man in this country who is rich enough to pay income-tax has at one time or other in his life effected a very remarkable transaction in wine.Sometimes he has made such a bargain as he never expects to make again.Sometimes he is the only man in England, not a peer of the realm, who has got a single drop of a certain famous vintage which has perished from the face of the earth.Sometimes he has purchased, with a friend, a few last left dozens from the cellar of a deceased potentate, at a price so exorbitant that he can only wag his head and decline mentioning it; and, if you ask his friend, that friend will wag his head, and decline mentioning it also.Sometimes he has been at an out-of-the-way country inn; has found the sherry not drinkable;has asked if there is no other wine in the house; has been informed that there is some "sourish foreign stuff that nobody ever drinks"; has called for a bottle of it; has found it Burgundy, such as all France cannot now produce, has cunningly kept his own counsel with the widowed landlady, and has bought the whole stock for "an old song." Sometimes he knows the proprietor of a famous tavern in London, and he recommends his one or two particular friends, the next time they are passing that way, to go in and dine, and give his compliments to the landlord, and ask for a bottle of the brown sherry, with the light blue--as distinguished from the dark blue--seal.Thousands of people dine there every year, and think they have got the famous sherry when they get the dark blue seal; but the real wine, the famous wine, is the light blue seal, and nobody in England knows it but the landlord and his friends.In all these wine-conversations, whatever variety there may be in the various experiences related, one of two great first principles is invariably assumed by each speaker in succession.Either he knows more about it than any one else, or he has got better wine of his own even than the excellent wine he is now drinking.Men can get together sometimes without talking of women, without talking of horses, without talking of politics, but they cannot assemble to eat a meal together without talking of wine, and they cannot talk of wine without assuming to each one of themselves an absolute infallibility in connection with that single subject which they would shrink from asserting in relation to any other topic under the sun.
