When, thanks to a good lunch, the party felt sufficiently recovered from its adventure, the members scattered. Some went to try a few shots, some to see the trophy-hall and other arrangements, and Frymann went to fetch his daughter and the women whose guest she was; for they were all to meet again for dinner at the same table which stood nearly in the centre of the hall and not far from the platform. They took note of its number and separated in the best of spirits and free from all care. Exactly at twelve o'clock the dinner guests, who were different ones every day and numbered several thousand people, sat down at the table. Country and city people, men and women, old and young, scholars and the unlearned--they all sat joyfully side by side and waited for the soup, opening bottles and cutting bread meanwhile. Not a single malicious face, not a scream or shrill laugh was seen or heard among them, nothing but the steady hum of a glad wedding feast magnified a hundredfold, the tempered wave-beat of a happy and self-contained ocean. Here a long table filled with marksmen, there a double row of blooming country girls, at a third table a meeting of so-called "old fellows" from all parts of the country, who had finally passed their examinations, and at a fourth a whole "immigrated" hamlet, men and women together. Yet these seated hosts formed only half of the assemblage; an equally numerous crowd of spectators streamed uninterruptedly through the aisles and spaces and circled ceaselessly about the diners. They--praise and thanks be to God!--were the careful and economical ones who had counted the cost and satisfied their hunger elsewhere for even less money, that half of the nation that always manages things so much more cheaply and frugally, while the other half flings away money right and left; then there were also the over-fastidious ones who did not trust the cooking and thought the forks were too cheap; and finally there were the poor and the children, who were involuntary spectators. But the former made no unkind remarks and the latter displayed neither torn clothes nor jealous looks; on the contrary, the thrifty ones took pleasure in the spendthrifts, and the super-refined who thought the dishes of green peas in July ridiculous, walked about as good-humoredly as the poor who found their fragrance most tempting. Here and there, to be sure, a piece of culpable selfishness appeared as, for instance, when some tight-fisted young peasant succeeded in slipping unseen into a vacated place and eating away with the rest without having paid; and, what was still worse in the eyes of those who love order and discipline, this reprehensible act did not even result in an altercation and forcible ejection.