I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that it is neither in my power nor in my pen's to _half_ portray, and that in a feeble style, how the guests--there were almost as many there as there were chairs--enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover, there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom's guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day before the closing of the gate; how not only was there _one_ course served up, but a second, a "Doppelgänger." To anyone, indeed, who has dined at great men's tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs (the hairdresser's wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided for the first course. 1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre had in the convent--that is to say, merely the tail. 2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art. 3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the butcher's shop, _sweetly_ treated. 4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself. 5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had sent their best members, as a community does to parliament. I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly sketching for them a little "cookery-piece" of the second course.