THE    FEAST.                               507
tall, black cylinder, such as I have seen in the Baltic cities, standing like a column in the corner: the next, a platoon of tobacco-pipes paraded against the wall: the next—let me be honest, it was the first—a table, with a clean white cloth, and plates, knives, and forks, all equally clean. Overhead hang beams as heavy as the carlines of a ship's cabin: below is an uncovered floor of scrupulous polish: the windows are recessed, glazed in small squares, and opening, door-like, behind muslin curtains : the walls canvas, painted, and decorated with a few prints altogether remarkable for intensity of color. The looking-glass; I reserve it for more special mention. It was not very large, but it was the first we had encountered since we came into the regions of ice. " To see ourselves as others see us" is not always the prayer of an intelligent self-love. Sharp-visaged, staring, weather-beaten old men, wrinkle-marked,tawny-bearded,haggard-looking: the boys of Uppernavik are better bred than the New Yorkers, or they would have mobbed us.
The ladies—they were ladies, they knew no superiors ; they were self-possessed, hospitable; they wore frocks, and they did not laugh at us—the ladies spread the meal, coffee, loons' eggs, brown bread, and a welcome. We ate like j ail-birds. At last came the crowning act of hospitality; on the bottom of a blue saucer, radiating like the spokes of a wheel or the sticks of a Delaware's camp-fire, crisp, pale, yet blushing at their tips, and crowned each with its little verdant tuft— ten radishes ! Talk of the mango of Luzon and the mangostine of Borneo, the cherimoya of Peru, the pine of Sumatra, the seckel-pear of Schuylkill meadows; but the palate must cease to have a memory before I yield a place to any of them alongside the ten radishes of Uppernavik.