"O, save the snails, please do, for me!" said a little girl, holding out her apron, full of painted shells.
"Boil them and eat them," said my juvenile friend.
"You cant think how nice they are with vinegar!" said the mulatto girl.
I remembered our own appetite for periwinkles, and said nothing; but added my mite of snail-flesh to the collection.
I was talking to the lord of the vineyard, when some one--there was petticoats in the case--dashed at him from behind, and instantly a couple of hands clasped his neck, and one of them squashed a huge bunch of grapes over his mouth and nose, rubbing in the burst and bleeding fruit as vigorously as if it were a healing ointment, while streams of juice squirted from between the fingers of the fair assailant, and streamed down the patron's equivocal shirt. After being half burked, the good man shook his fist at the girl as she flew, laughing, down the alley; and then resuming his talk with me, he said: "We call that, _Faire des moustaches_. We all do it at vintage time." And ten minutes thereafter I saw the jolly old boy go chasing an ancient crone of a pail-bearer, a bunch of very ripe grapes in his hand, amid the delighted hurrahs of all assembled.
Dinner was late, for it behoves vintagers to make the best of the daylight. The ordinary hired labourers dined, indeed, soon after noon; but I am talking of the feast of honour. It was served in a thinly-furnished, stone-paved, damp and dismal _salle à manger_. A few additional ladies with their beaux, grand provincial dandies, all of whom tried to outstrip each other in the magnificence of their waistcoats, had arrived from Bordeaux. It had been very hot, close weather for a day or two past, and everybody was imprecating curses on the heads of the mosquitos. The ladies, to prove the impeachment, stripped their sleeves, and showed each other the bites on their brown necks; and the gentlemen swore that the scamps were biting harder and harder. Then came the host, in a magnificently ill-cut coat--all the agricultural interest could not have furnished a worse--and his wife, very red in the face, for she had cooked dinner for the vintagers and for us; and then our host's father, a reverend old man in a black velvet scull cap, and long silver hair. The dinner was copious, and, as may be conceived, by no means served in the style of the _café de Paris_. But _soupe_, _bouilli_, _roti_, the stewed and the fried, speedily went the way of all flesh. Everybody _trinque-ed_ with everybody: the jingle of the meeting glasses rose even over the clatter of the knives and forks; the jolly host's heart grew warmer at every glass, and he issued imperious mandates for older and older wine. His comfortable wife, whose appetite had been affected by the cooking, made up for the catastrophe at the dessert. The old grandfather garulously narrated tales of wondrous vintages long ago. The waistcoats had all the scandal of Bordeaux at their finger ends; and the young ladies with the mosquito bites took to "making moustaches" on their male friends, with pancakes instead of grapes--a process by which the worthy host was, as usual, an especial sufferer.