Sez Robert, "Then I shall accept this invitation for breakfast for all our party." And after they went out I sez: "I'd hold myself a little back, Josiah. To say that you'd never had means to take breakfast in Jonesville shows ignorance and casts a slur on me."
"Oh, I meant I never had any tiffen with it, Samantha; you'll see it don't mean plain breakfast; you'll see that they'll pass some tiffen, and we shall have to eat it no matter what it's made on, rats or mice or anything. Whoever heard of common breakfast at twelve M.?"
Well, it did mean just breakfast, and we had a real good time. We went up in sedan chairs, though we might have gone on the cars. But we wanted to go slower to enjoy the scenery.
I had thought the view from the hill back of Grout Nickleson's wuz beautiful, and also the Pali at Honolulu, but it did seem to me that the seen we looked down on from the top of Victoria mountain wuz the most beautiful I ever did see. The city lay at our feet embowered in tropical foliage, with its handsome uneek buildin's, its narrer windin' streets stretchin' fur up the mountain side, runnin' into narrerer mountain paths covered with white sand. The beautiful houses and gardens of the English colony clost down to the shore. The tall masts of the vessels in the harbor looking like a water forest with flowers of gayly colored flags. And further off the Canton or Pearl River, with scores of villages dotting its banks; glittering white temples, with their pinnacles glistening in the sunlight; pagodas, gayly painted with gilded bells, rising up from the beautiful tropical foliage; broad green fields; mountains soarin' up towards the blue heavens and the blue waters of the sea.
A fair seen, a fair seen! I wished that sister Henzy could see it, and told Josiah so.
And he sez with a satisfied look, "Wait till I describe it to 'em, Samantha. They'd ruther have me describe it to 'em than see it themselves." I doubted it some, but didn't contend.
The breakfast wuz a good one, though I should have called it dinner to home. Josiah wuz on the lookout, I could see, for tiffen to be passed, but it wuzn't, so he ort to give up, but wouldn't; but argyed with me out to one side that "they wuz out of tiffen, and hadn't time to buy any and couldn't borry."