Around The Tea Table by T. De Witt Talmage

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AROUND THE TEA-TABLE.

BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE,

_Author of "Crumbs Swept Up," "Abominations of Modern Society," "Old Wells
Dug Out," Etc._

PUBLISHED BY
THE CHRISTIAN HERALD,
LOUIS KLOPSCH, Proprietor,
BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK.

BY LOUIS KLOPSCH.

PREFACE.

At breakfast we have no time to spare, for the duties of the day are
clamoring for attention; at the noon-day dining hour some of the family
are absent; but at six o'clock in the evening we all come to the
tea-table for chit-chat and the recital of adventures. We take our
friends in with us--the more friends, the merrier. You may imagine that
the following chapters are things said or conversations indulged in, or
papers read, or paragraphs, made up from that interview. We now open
the doors very wide and invite all to come in and be seated around the
tea-table.

T. DEW. T.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.
I.--The table-cloth is spread
II.--Mr. Givemfits and Dr. Butterfield
III.--A growler soothed
IV.--Carlo and the freezer
V.--Old games repeated
VI.--The full-blooded cow
VII.--The dregs in Leatherback's tea-cup
VIII.--The hot axle
IX.--Beefsteak for ministers
X.--Autobiography of an old pair of scissors
XI.--A lie, zoologically considered
XII.--A breath of English air
XIII.--The midnight lecture
XIV.--The sexton
XV.--The old cradle
XVI.--The horse's letter
XVII.--Kings of the kennel
XVIII.--The massacre of church music
XIX.--The battle of pew and pulpit
XX.--The devil's grist-mill
XXI.--The conductor's dream
XXII.--Push & Pull
XXIII.--Bostonians
XXIV.--Jonah vs. the whale
XXV.--Something under the sofa
XXVI.--The way to keep fresh
XXVII.--Christmas bells
XXVIII.--Poor preaching
XXIX.--Shelves a man's index
XXX.--Behavior at church
XXXI.--Masculine and feminine
XXXII.--Literary felony
XXXIII.--Literary abstinence
XXXIV.--Short or long pastorates
XXXV.--An editor's chip basket
XXXVI.--The manhood of service
XXXVII.--Balky people
XXXVIII.--Anonymous letters
XXXIX.--Brawn or brain
XL.--Warm-weather religion
XLI.--Hiding eggs for Easter
XLII.--Sink or swim
XLIII.--Shells from the beach
XLIV.--Catching the bay mare
XLV.--Our first and last cigar
XLVI.--Move, moving, moved
XLVII.--The advantage of small libraries
XLVIII.--Reformation in letter writing
XLIX.--Royal marriages
L.--Three visits
LI.--Manahachtanienks
LII.--A dip in the sea
LIII.--Hard shell considerations
LIV.--Wiseman, Heavyasbricks and Quizzle
LV.--A layer of waffles
LVI.--Friday evening

SABBATH EVENINGS.

LVII.--The Sabbath evening tea-table
LVIII.--The warm heart of Christ
LIX.--Sacrifice everything
LX.--The youngsters have left
LXI.--Family prayers
LXII.--A call to sailors
LXIII.--Jehoshaphat's shipping
LXIV.--All about mercy
LXV.--Under the camel's saddle
LXVI.--Half-and-half churches
LXVII.--Thorns
LXVIII.--Who touched me?

AROUND THE TEA-TABLE.

CHAPTER I.

THE TABLE-CLOTH IS SPREAD.

Our theory has always been, "Eat lightly in the evening." While,
therefore, morning and noon there is bountifulness, we do not have much
on our tea-table but dishes and talk. The most of the world's work
ought to be finished by six o'clock p.m. The children are home from
school. The wife is done mending or shopping. The merchant has got
through with dry-goods or hardware. Let the ring of the tea-bell be
sharp and musical. Walk into the room fragrant with Oolong or Young
Hyson. Seat yourself at the tea-table wide enough apart to have room to
take out your pocket-handkerchief if you want to cry at any pitiful
story of the day, or to spread yourself in laughter if some one
propound an irresistible conundrum.

The bottle rules the sensual world, but the tea-cup is queen in all the
fair dominions. Once this leaf was very rare, and fifty dollars a pound;
and when the East India Company made a present to the king of two pounds
and two ounces, it was considered worth a mark in history. But now Uncle
Sam and his wife every year pour thirty million pounds of it into their
saucers. Twelve hundred years ago, a Chinese scholar by the name of Lo Yu
wrote of tea, "It tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels
lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness,
lightens and refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties." Our
own observation is that there is nothing that so loosens the hinge of the
tongue, soothes the temper, exhilarates the diaphragm, kindles sociality
and makes the future promising. Like one of the small glasses in the wall
of Barnum's old museum, through which you could see cities and mountains
bathed in sunshine, so, as you drink from the tea-cup, and get on toward
the bottom so that it is sufficiently elevated, you can see almost anything
glorious that you want to. We had a great-aunt who used to come from town
with the pockets of her bombazine dress standing way out with nice things
for the children, but she would come in looking black as a thunder cloud
until she had got through with her first cup of tea, when she would empty
her right pocket of sugarplums, and having finished her second cup would
empty the other pocket, and after she had taken an extra third cup, because
she felt so very chilly, it took all the sitting-room and parlor and
kitchen to contain her exhilaration.

Be not surprised if, after your friends are seated at the table, the style
of the conversation depends very much on the kind of tea that the housewife
pours for the guests. If it be genuine Young Hyson, the leaves of which are
gathered early in the season, the talk will be fresh, and spirited, and
sunshiny. If it be what the Chinese call Pearl tea, but our merchants have
named Gunpowder, the conversation will be explosive, and somebody's
reputation will be killed before you get through. If it be green tea,
prepared by large infusion of Prussian blue and gypsum, or black tea mixed
with pulverized black lead, you may expect there will be a poisonous effect
in the conversation and the moral health damaged. The English Parliament
found that there had come into that country two million pounds of what the
merchants call "lie tea," and, as far as I can estimate, about the same
amount has been imported into the United States; and when the housewife
pours into the cups of her guests a decoction of this "lie tea," the group
are sure to fall to talking about their neighbors, and misrepresenting
everything they touch. One meeting of a "sewing society" up in Canada,
where this tea was served, resulted in two law-suits for slander, four
black eyes that were not originally of that color, the expulsion of the
minister, and the abrupt removal from the top of the sexton's head of all
capillary adornment.

But on our tea-table we will have first-rate Ningyong, or Pouchong, or
Souchong, or Oolong, so that the conversation may be pure and healthy.

We propose from time to time to report some of the talk of our visitors at
the tea-table. We do not entertain at tea many very great men. The fact is
that great men at the tea-table for the most part are a bore. They are apt
to be self-absorbed, or so profound I cannot understand them, or analytical
of food, or nervous from having studied themselves half to death, or exhume
a piece of brown bread from their coat-tail because they are dyspeptic, or
make such solemn remarks about hydro-benzamide or sulphindigotic acid that
the children get frightened and burst out crying, thinking something
dreadful is going to happen. Learned Johnson, splashing his pompous wit
over the table for Boswell to pick up, must have been a sublime nuisance.
It was said of Goldsmith that "he wrote like an angel and talked like poor
Poll." There is more interest in the dining-room when we have ordinary
people than when we have extraordinary.

There are men and women who occasionally meet at our tea-table whose
portraits are worth taking. There are Dr. Butterfield, Mr. Givemfits, Dr.
Heavyasbricks, Miss Smiley and Miss Stinger, who come to see us. We expect
to invite them all to tea very soon; and as you will in future hear of
their talk, it is better that I tell you now some of their characteristics.

Dr. Butterfield is one of our most welcome visitors at the tea-table. As
his name indicates, he is both melting and beautiful. He always takes
pleasant views of things. He likes his tea sweet; and after his cup is
passed to him, he frequently hands it back, and says, "This is really
delightful, but a little more sugar, if you please." He has a mellowing
effect upon the whole company. After hearing him talk a little while, I
find tears standing in my eyes without any sufficient reason. It is almost
as good as a sermon to see him wipe his mouth with a napkin. I would not
want him all alone to tea, because it would be making a meal of sweetmeats.
But when he is present with others of different temperament, he is
entertaining. He always reminds me of the dessert called floating island,
beaten egg on custard. On all subjects--political, social and religious--he
takes the smooth side. He is a minister, and preached a course of fifty-one
sermons on heaven in one year, saying that he would preach on the last and
fifty-second Sunday concerning a place of quite opposite character; but the
audience assembling on that day, in August, he rose and said that it was
too hot to preach, and so dismissed them immediately with a benediction. At
the tea-table I never could persuade him to take any currant-jelly, for he
always preferred strawberry-jam. He rejects acidity.

We generally place opposite him at the tea-table Mr. Givemfits. He is the
very antipodes of Dr. Butterfield; and when the two talk, you get both
sides of a subject. I have to laugh to hear them talk; and my little girl,
at the controversial collisions, gets into such hysterics that we have to
send her with her mouth full into the next room, to be pounded on the back
to stop her from choking. My friend Givemfits is "down on" almost
everything but tea, and I think one reason of his nervous, sharp, petulant
way is that he takes too much of this beverage. He thinks the world is very
soon coming to an end, and says, "The sooner the better, confound it!" He
is a literary man, a newspaper writer, a book critic, and so on; but if he
were a minister, he would preach a course of fifty-one sermons on "future
punishment," proposing to preach the fifty-second and last Sabbath on
"future rewards;" but the last Sabbath, coming in December, he would say to
his audience, "Really, it is too cold to preach. We will close with the
doxology and omit the benediction, as I must go down by the stove to warm."

He does not like women--thinks they are of no use in the world, save to set
the tea a-drawing. Says there was no trouble in Paradise till a female came
there, and that ever since Adam lost the rib woman has been to man a bad
pain in the side. He thinks that Dr. Butterfield, who sits opposite him at
the tea-table, is something of a hypocrite, and asks him all sorts of
puzzling questions. The fact is, it is vinegar-cruet against sugar-bowl in
perpetual controversy. I do not blame Givemfits as much as many do. His
digestion is poor. The chills and fever enlarged his spleen. He has
frequent attacks of neuralgia. Once a week he has the sick headache. His
liver is out of order. He has twinges of rheumatism. Nothing he ever takes
agrees with him but tea, and that doesn't. He has had a good deal of trial,
and the thunder of trouble has soured the milk of human kindness. When he
gets criticising Dr. Butterfield's sermons and books, I have sometimes to
pretend that I hear somebody at the front door, so that I can go out in the
hall and have an uproarious laugh without being indecorous. It is one of
the great amusements of my life to have on opposite sides of my tea-table
Dr. Butterfield and Mr. Givemfits.

But we have many others who come to our tea-table: Miss Smiley, who often
runs in about six o'clock. All sweetness is Miss Smiley. She seems to like
everybody, and everybody seems to like her. Also Miss Stinger, sharp as a
hornet, prides herself on saying things that cut; dislikes men; cannot bear
the sight of a pair of boots; loathes a shaving apparatus; thinks Eve would
have shown better capacity for housekeeping if she had, the first time she
used her broom, swept Adam out of Paradise. Besides these ladies, many
good, bright, useful and sensible people of all kinds. In a few days we
shall invite a group of them to tea, and you shall hear some of their
discussions of men and books and things. We shall order a canister of the
best Young Hyson, pull out the extension-table, hang on the kettle, stir
the blaze, and with chamois and silver-powder scour up the tea-set that we
never use save when we have company.

CHAPTER II.

MR. GIVEMFITS AND DR. BUTTERFIELD.

The tea-kettle never sang a sweeter song than on the evening I speak of. It
evidently knew that company was coming. At the appointed time our two
friends, Dr. Butterfield and Mr. Givemfits, arrived. As already intimated,
they were opposite in temperament--the former mild, mellow, fat,
good-natured and of fine digestion, always seeing the bright side of
anything; the other, splenetic, harsh, and when he swallowed anything was
not sure whether he would be the death of it, or it would be the death of
him.

No sooner had they taken their places opposite each other at the table than
conversation opened. As my wife was handing the tea over to Mr. Givemfits
the latter broke out in a tirade against the weather. He said that this
winter was the most unbearable that had ever been known in the almanacs.
When it did not rain, it snowed; and when it was not mud, it was sleet. At
this point he turned around and coughed violently, and said that in such
atmosphere it was impossible to keep clear of colds. He thought he would go
South. He would rather not live at all than live in such a climate as this.
No chance here, save for doctors and undertakers, and even they have to
take their own medicines and lie in their own coffins. At this Dr.
Butterfield gave a good-natured laugh, and said, "I admit the
inconveniences of the weather; but are you not aware that there has been a
drought for three years in the country, and great suffering in the land for
lack of rain? We need all this wet weather to make an equilibrium. What is
discomfort to you is the wealth of the land. Besides that, I find that if I
cannot get sunshine in the open air I can carry it in the crown of my hat.
He who has a warm coat, and a full stove, and a comfortable house, ought
not to spend much of his time in complaint."

Miss Smiley slid this moment into the conversation with a hearty "Ha! ha!"
She said, "This last winter has been the happiest of my life. I never hear
the winds gallop but I want to join them. The snow is only the winter in
blossom. Instead of here and there on the pond, the whole country is
covered with white lilies. I have seen gracefulness enough in the curve of
a snowdrift to keep me in admiration for a week. Do you remember that
morning after the storm of sleet, when every tree stood in mail of ice,
with drawn sword of icicle? Besides, I think the winter drives us in, and
drives us together. We have never had such a time at our house with
checker-boards and dominoes, and blind-man's-buff, and the piano, as this
winter. Father and mother said it seemed to them like getting married over
again. Besides that, on nights when the storm was so great that the
door-bell went to bed and slept soundly, Charles Dickens stepped in from
Gad's Hill; and Henry W. Longfellow, without knocking, entered the
sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his
hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in
from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on
the table--Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their
prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall floor,
and hung his 'sporting jacket' on the hat-rack, and shook the carpet brown
with Highland heather. As Walter Scott came in his dog scampered in after
him, and put both paws up on the marble-top table; and Minnie asked the
old man why he did not part his hair better, instead of letting it hang all
over his forehead, and he apologized for it by the fact that he had been on
a long tramp from Melrose Abbey to Kenilworth Castle. But I think as
thrilling an evening as we had this winter was with a man who walked in
with a prison-jacket, his shoes mouldy, and his cheek pallid for the want
of the sunlight. He was so tired that he went immediately to sleep. He
would not take the sofa, saying he was not used to that, but he stretched
himself on the floor and put his head on an ottoman. At first he snored
dreadfully, and it was evident he had a horrid dream; but after a while he
got easier, and a smile came over his face, and he woke himself singing and
shouting. I said, 'What is the matter with you, and what were you dreaming
about?' 'Well,' he said, 'the bad dream I had was about the City of
Destruction, and the happy dream was about the Celestial City;' and we all
knew him right away, and shouted, 'Glorious old John Bunyan! How is
Christiana?' So, you see," said Miss Smiley, "on stormy nights we really
have a pleasanter time than when the moon and stars are reigning."

Miss Stinger had sat quietly looking into her tea-cup until this moment,
when she clashed her spoon into the saucer, and said, "If there is any
thing I dislike, it is an attempt at poetry when you can't do it. I know
some people who always try to show themselves in public; but when they are
home, they never have their collar on straight, and in the morning look
like a whirlwind breakfasting on a haystack. As for me, I am practical, and
winter is winter, and sleet is sleet, and ice is ice, and a tea-cup is a
tea-cup; and if you will pass mine up to the hostess to be resupplied, I
will like it a great deal better than all this sentimentalism. No
sweetening, if you please. I do not like things sweet. Do not put in any of
your beautiful snow for sugar, nor stir it with an icicle."

This sudden jerk in the conversation snapped it off, and for a moment there
was quiet. I knew not how to get conversation started again. Our usual way
is to talk about the weather; but that subject had been already exhausted.

Suddenly I saw the color for the first time in years come into the face of
Mr. Givemfits. The fact was that, in biting a hard crust of bread, he had
struck a sore tooth which had been troubling him, and he broke out with the
exclamation, "Dr. Butterfield, the physical and moral world is
degenerating. Things get worse and worse. Look, for instance, at the tone
of many of the newspapers; gossip, abuse, lies, blackmail, make up the
chief part of them, and useful intelligence is the exception. The public
have more interest in murders and steamboat explosions than in the items of
mental and spiritual progress. Church and State are covered up with
newspaper mud."

"Stop!" said Dr. Butterfield. "Don't you ever buy newspapers?"

CHAPTER III.

A GROWLER SOOTHED.

Givemfits said to Dr. Butterfield, "You asked me last evening if I ever
bought newspapers. I reply, Yes, and write for them too.

"But I see their degeneracy. Once you could believe nearly all they said;
now he is a fool who believes a tenth part of it. There is the New York
'Scandalmonger,' and the Philadelphia 'Prestidigitateur,' and the Boston
'Prolific,' which do nothing but hoodwink and confound the public mind. Ten
dollars will get a favorable report of a meeting, or as much will get it
caricatured. There is a secret spring behind almost every column. It
depends on what the editor had for supper the night before whether he wants
Foster hung or his sentence commuted. If the literary man had toast and
tea, as weak as this before me, he sleeps soundly, and next day says in his
columns that Foster ought not to be executed; he is a good fellow, and the
clergymen who went to Albany to get him pardoned were engaged in a holy
calling, and their congregations had better hold fast of them lest they go
up like Elijah. But if the editor had a supper at eleven, o'clock at night
of scallops fried in poor lard, and a little too much bourbon, the next day
he is headachy, and says Foster, the scalawag, ought to be hung, or beaten
to death with his own car-hook, and the ministers who went to Albany to get
him pardoned might better have been taking tea with some of the old ladies.
I have been behind the scenes and know all about it, and must admit that I
have done some of the bad work myself. I have on my writing-stand thirty
or forty books to discuss as a critic, and the column must be made up. Do
you think I take time to read the thirty or forty books? No. I first take a
dive into the index, a second dive into the preface, a third dive into the
four hundredth page, the fourth dive into the seventieth page, and then
seize my pen and do up the whole job in fifteen minutes. I make up my mind
to like the book or not to like it, according as I admire or despise the
author. But the leniency or severity of my article depends on whether the
room is cold and my rheumatism that day is sharp or easy. Speaking of these
things reminds me that the sermon which the Right Reverend Bishop
Goodenough preached last Sunday, on 'Growth in Grace,' was taken down and
brought to our office by a reporter who fell over the door-sill of the
sanctum so drunk we had to help him up and fish in his pockets for the
bishop's sermon on holiness of heart and life, which we were sure was
somewhere about him."

"Tut! tut!" cried Dr. Butterfield. "I think, Mr. Givemfits, you are
entirely mistaken. (The doctor all the while stirring the sugar in his
cup.) I think the printing-press is a mighty agency for the world's
betterment. If I were not a minister, I would be an editor. There are
Bohemians in the newspaper profession, as in all others, but do not
denounce the entire apostleship for the sake of one Judas. Reporters, as I
know them, are clever fellows, worked almost to death, compelled to keep
unseasonable hours, and have temptations to fight which few other
occupations endure. Considering the blunders and indistinctness of the
public speaker, I think they get things wonderfully accurate. The speaker
murders the king's English, and is mad because the reporter cannot
resuscitate the corpse. I once made a speech at an ice-cream festival amid
great embarrassments, and hemmed, and hawed, and expectorated cotton from
my dry mouth, and sweat like a Turkish bath, the adjectives, and the nouns,
and verbs, and prepositions of my address keeping an Irish wake; but the
next day, in the 'Johnstown Advocate,' my remarks read as gracefully as
Addison's 'Spectator.' I knew a phonographer in Washington whose entire
business it was to weed out from Congressmen's speeches the sins against
Anglo-Saxon; but the work was too much for him, and he died of delirium
tremens, from having drank too much of the wine of syntax, in his ravings
imagining that 'interrogations' were crawling over him like snakes, and
that 'interjections' were thrusting him through with daggers and 'periods'
struck him like bullets, and his body seemed torn apart by disjunctive
conjunctions. No, Mr. Givemfits, you are too hard. And as to the
book-critics whom you condemn, they do more for the circulation of books
than any other class, especially if they denounce and caricature, for then
human nature will see the book at any price. After I had published my book
on 'The Philosophy of Civilization,' it was so badgered by the critics and
called so many hard names that my publishers could not print it fast enough
to meet the demands of the curious. Besides, what would we do without the
newspaper? With, the iron rake of the telegraph it draws the whole world to
our door every morning. The sermon that the minister preached to five
hundred people on Sabbath the newspaper next day preaches to fifty
thousand. It takes the verses which the poet chimed in his small room of
ten feet by six, and rings them into the ears of the continent. The
cylinder of the printing-press is to be one of the wheels of the Lord's
chariot. The good newspapers will overcome the bad ones, and the
honey-bees will outnumber the hornets. Instead of the three or four
religious newspapers that once lived on gruel and pap, sitting down once a
week on some good man's door-step to rest, thankful if not kicked off, now
many of the denominations have stalwart journals that swing their scythe
through the sins of the world, and are avant couriers of the Lord's
coming."

As Dr. Butterfield concluded this sentence his face shone like a harvest
moon. We had all dropped our knives, and were looking at him. The Young
Hyson tea was having its mollifying effect on the whole company. Mr.
Givemfits had made way with his fourth cup (they were small cups, the set
we use for company), and he was entirely soothed and moderated in his
opinions about everything, and actually clapped his hands at Dr.
Butterfield's peroration. Even Miss Stinger was in a glow, for she had
drank large quantities of the fragrant beverage while piping hot, and in
her delight she took Givemfits' arm, and asked him if he ever meant to get
married. Miss Smiley smiled. Then Dr. Butterfield lifted his cup, and
proposed a toast which we all drank standing: "The mission of the
printing-press! The salubrity of the climate! The prospects ahead! The
wonders of Oolong and Young Hyson!"

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