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Gala-Days

by Gail Hamilton

Pages
about 344
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
6.3 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 3.5 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

H. "Your squaw dialect. You should have asked for a bonnet de nuit."

I was very warm, and Halicarnassus said he was tired; so he went into a restaurant and ordered strawberries,--that luscious fruit, quivering on the border-land of ambrosia and nectar.

"Doubtless," says honest, quaint, delightful Isaac,--and he never spoke a truer word,--"doubtless God might have made a better berry than a strawberry, but doubtless God never did."

Then we sat and amused ourselves after the usual brilliant fashion of people who are waiting in hotel parlors, railroad-stations, and restaurants. We surveyed the gilding and the carpet and the mirrors and the curtains. We hazarded profound conjectures touching the people assembled. We studied the bill of fare as if it contained the secret of our army's delay upon the Potomac, and had just concluded that the first crop of strawberries was exhausted, and they were waiting for the second crop to grow, when Hebe hove in sight with her nectared ambrosia in a pair of cracked, browny-white saucers, with browny-green silver spoons. I poured out what professed to be cream, but proved very low-spirited milk, in which a few disheartened strawberries appeared rari nantes. I looked at them in dismay. Then curiosity smote me, and I counted them. Just fifteen.

I was not thinking of the cent, but I had promised myself a feast; and what is a feast, susceptible of enumeration? Cleopatra was right. "That love"--and the same is true of strawberries--"is beggarly which can be reckoned." Infinity alone is glory.

"Perhaps the quality will atone for the quantity," said Halicarnassus, scooping up at least half of his at one "arm-sweep."

"It is the spoons!" I exclaimed, in a fright. "They are German silver! You will be poisoned!" and knocked his out of his hand with such instinctive, sudden violence that it flew to the other side of the room, where an old gentleman sat over his newspaper and dinner.

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