While this was going on, being a slim youth, I slipped beneath the uplifted arm of a stout yeoman, and made a safe ingress. I stood astonished at the place into which I had entered. Those ample and lofty rooms, in which stood huge pieces of roast-beef on huge pewter dishes, and great leathern jacks, tankards, and modern jugs of ale, at which scores of people were eating and drinking as voraciously as if they had been fasting all the one-and-twenty years to do due honour to this great birth-day; while the servants were running to and fro, filling up foaming measures, which were emptied again with wonderful rapidity. Those vast kitchens too, with their mighty fireplaces, and tongs, and pokers, and spits fit for the kitchen of Polyphemus; with broiling cooks and hurrying menials, called on by twenty voices at once. I made my way to the front court, where, under canvass awnings, long tables were set out for the tenantry and yeomanry of the neighbourhood, admitted by ticket. O what a company of jolly, rosy, full-grown, well-fed fellows, was there, making no sham onset on the plum-pudding and roast-beef of Old England! The band kept up a triumphant din; but when it ceased for a moment, what a rattle of knives and forks, and a clatter of ale-cups, what a clamour of tongues and hearty laughter became perceptible! And all round the court, the walls were covered with swarms of men, that climbed up no trivial height to get a view of the jovial banquet, and many a cry was raised to throw up thither some of those good things. And sure enough, here went a piece of beef, and here a lump of pudding; and a score of hands caught at them; and a hundred voices joined in the roar of laughter as they were caught, or fell back again into the court, or flew over the wall amongst the scrambling crowd.