The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 13, September, 1835Various
History
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 13, September, 1835
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
The room within which they found themselves, proved to be the shop of
an undertaker--but an open trap-door in a corner of the floor near the
entrance, looked down upon a long range of wine-cellars, whose depths
the occasional sounds of bursting bottles proclaimed to be well stored
with their appropriate contents. In the middle of the room stood a
table--in the centre of which again arose a huge tub of what appeared
to be punch. Bottles of various wines and cordials, together with
grotesque jugs, pitchers, and flagons of every shape and quality, were
scattered profusely upon the board. Around it, upon coffin-tressels,
was seated a company of six--this company I will endeavor to delineate
one by one.
Fronting the entrance, and elevated a little above his companions, sat
a personage who appeared to be the president of the table. His stature
was gaunt and tall, and Legs was confounded to behold in him a figure
more emaciated than himself. His face was yellower than the yellowest
saffron--but no feature of his visage, excepting one alone, was
sufficiently marked to merit a particular description. This one
consisted in a forehead so unusually and hideously lofty, as to have
the appearance of a bonnet or crown of flesh superseded upon the
natural head. His mouth was puckered and dimpled into a singular
expression of ghastly affability, and his eyes, as indeed the eyes of
all at table, were glazed over with the fumes of intoxication.
This gentleman was clothed from head to foot in a richly embroidered
black silk-velvet pall wrapped negligently around his form after the
fashion of a Spanish cloak. His head was stuck all full of tall, sable
hearse-plumes, which he nodded to and fro with a jaunty and knowing
air, and, in his right hand, he held a huge human thigh-bone, with
which he appeared to have been just knocking down some member of the
company for a song.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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