After the first moment, when the association with the home hearth and the simple fireside evenings of other days had spent itself, the crickets were rather awful, and personally I would rather have had the band back. But their weird music prompted a closer union of the guests, and our chairs were closer together on the veranda and in the office. We found that we were very charming and interesting people, and I began to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever make good by not seeking the acquaintance of the seven hundred others who were gone. From day to day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, but we never spoke of the departures; we instinctively recognized that it would have been bad form; we were like the garrison of a beleaguered city, that lost a few men by famine or foray from time to time, but kept up a heroic pretense that they were as many as ever. Or, we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a water-logged vessel, and caught from it now and then by a hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping away into the gulf from mere exhaustion. These figures are rather violent, and present only a subjective effect in the more sensitive spirits. As a matter of fact we lived luxuriously all the time. The time came when we heard that on a certain day the _chef_ was going, but we should not have known he was gone by any difference in the table. It grew rather more attractive; if there were fewer dishes, they were better cooked; one could fancy a touch of personal attention in them, which one could not have fancied when we were seven hundred and fifty at table, and the help who served us were three hundred and fifty. VII. The help had gradually dwindled away till there were not more than fifty. I had kept my waiter through all; he was a quiet elderly man of formed habits, whom I associated with the idea of permanency in every way, so that I could scarcely believe that we were to be parted. But one morning he was seized by the curious foreboding of departure which seemed really one of its symptoms among his tribe, and he said he did not know but he should be going soon. I said, Oh, I hoped not; and he answered bravely that he hoped not too, but he shook his head, and we both felt that it was best to let a final half-dollar pass between us in expression of a provisional farewell. That was indeed the last of him, and that day when I came in to lunch I found that I was appointed another table, in another place, with another waiter to take my order. It was a little shock, but I was not unprepared. I had noted the gradual dismantling of the tables until now they stretched long rows of barren surfaces down the tenth of a mile which the dining-room covered, and showed their reverberated labyrinth in the mirrors of the vast sideboards at either end of the hall. The remaining guests were snugly grouped on the seaward side of the room, where our tables commanded the marine views that I had long vainly envied others.