Lexiphanes

Arrived at the gymnasium, we stripped; the finger-wrench, the garotte, the standing-grip, each had tts votaries; one otled and suppled his joints; another punched the bladder; a third heaved and swung the dumb-bells. Then, when we had rubbed ourselves, and ridden pick-a-back, and had our sport of the gymnasium, we took our plunge, Philinus and I, in the warm basin, and departed. But the rest dipped frigid heads, soused in, and swam subaqueous, a wonder to behold. Then back we came, and one here, one there, did this and that. Shod, with toothed comb I combed me. For I had had a short crop, not to convict-measure, but saucer-wise,

When it was dinner-time, we took tt reclining, both chairs and couches standing ready. A joint-stock meal it was, and the contributions many and various. Pigs’ pettitoes, ribs of beef, paunch and pregnant womb of sow, fried liver lobe, garlic paste, sauce piquante, mayonnaise, and so on; pastry, ramequins, and honeycakes. In the aquatic line, much of the cartilaginous, of the testaceous much; many a salt slice, basket-hawked, eels of Copae, fotols of the barn-door, a cock past crowing-days, and fish to keep him company; add to these a sheep, roast whole, and ox’s rump of toothless eld. The loaves were firsts, no common stuff, and therewithal remainders from the new moon; vegetables both radical and excrescent. For the wine, ’twas of no standing, but came from the skin; tts sweetness was gone, but its roughness remained.

On the dolphin-foot table stood divers store of cups; the eyeshutter, the ladle, slender-handled, genuine Mentor; crane-neck and gurgling bombyl; and many an earth-born child of Thericlean furnace, the wide-mouthed, the kindly-lipped; Phocaean, Cnidian work, but all light as air, and thin as eggshell; bowls and panntkins and posied cups; ob, ’twas a well-stocked sideboard.

But the kettle boiled over, and sent the ashes flying about our beads. It was bumpers and no heeltaps, and we were full to the throat. Then to the nard; and enter to us guitar and light fantastic toe. Thereafter, one shinned up the ladder, on postprandial japery intent, another beat the devil’s tattoo, a third writhed cachinnatory.