But the dinner! A flourish of trumpets announced it; and well it deserved the compliment of such a preliminary. A huge sirloin, which balanced a baron of beef, was undergoing a rapid process of diminution under Gibbie's long carving whinger; six collared pigs, bristling with cloves, and having flowers stuck in their nostrils, stood erect on great platters. Around them were hares, turkies, geese, ducks, and chickens, roasted, stewed, fricasseed, and boiled. There was a vast silver salt-foot at each end, two grand epergnes of flowers and peacocks' feathers, two great salads, two hundred little manchets, venison, hams, salmon, flounders, crabs, and Crail capons,--all placed pell-mell without order of courses, among tarts, trifles, confections, pyramids of jelly and plumbdames, puddings and fruit of every description, disposed in ornamental figures of trees, birds, &c.
But, far above all this wilderness of viands towered a great edifice, representing a fortress; the towers were of pie-crust, with ramparts of wax; the cannon and sentinels were sugar-paste; the bullets were little bon-bons; the moat was filled with wine, and from the keep hung a flag with St. Andrew's silver saltire. This erection elicited great admiration from the guests, by whom it was unanimously named the Castle of Tangier, beneath the towers of which so many of their brave comrades had found a soldier's grave.
The feast proceeded in gallant style, amid unrestrained hilarity and bursts of military merriment. All did justice to the good things before them; while the servants, or ecuyers trenchant, were kept on the alert pouring forth Rhenish, Gascony, Muscadel, port and sherry, and the rich and luscious wine of Frontiniac, as if there had been a conflagration in the stomach of every guest.
On the right of the host sat the regimental minister, the Reverend Doctor Jonadab Joram (who by the courtesy of the Scottish service had the rank of Major), a bluff and jovial personage, whose merry eyes twinkled on each side of a bottle-nose, and who could stride and swagger, drink and play with any man--one who winked knowingly at landladies, kissed their daughters, and, if he chose, could have out-bullied a Mohock. He was brimful of jocularity, which had cost him a duel or two in Flanders, and was known to be "up to" a great many things not very consonant to the dignity of his cloth.