are still at your soup, tremble! for you
will be the loser of this race. Everywhere
round the table (as in other scenes
of life nearer home), I see a dozen faces,
greedy, selfish, and rapacious, trying to look
philosophically calm and unconcerned. One
would think that a large prize had been
offered to the man who should first finish
dinner, and yet not forget to taste every dish.
Plain joint of my country, over-roasted by
plain cook of my country, I despise you! Here
is a flower-bed of dishes. Stewed snails:
I let them pass. Brocoli alone, in a sea of
butter. I don't seem to like it; no more
does Spanker, who is getting warm in the
race, and would, if I did not stop him,
mildly call for champagne, to be "in
silver goblets quaffed," regardless of expense.
Now tear by us, ducking in and out, the
serried waiters putting in for shelter to
temporary bays.

There is veal, in warm brown slices, lapped,
fiery and deliciously, in tomato sauce. There
is wild duck, with a fine savagery in its
flavour. There is roast beef; and, between
duck and beef, a capricious mockery of sweet
custard and burnt sugar. Then comes a
partridge, and more fowl and more veal;
just as if the cook, in an exhausted syncope
of imagination, had given over invention,
and, like our modern dramatists, began again
with the A, B, C of his art. Now there
is a rush, cautiously violent, like the rush of
despairing sailors to the spirit-room, to the
sweetmeats; a fierce but playful dipping for
lots into the ratafia dishes; then a wiping of
beards and lips with wet napkins: a drawling
and tossing back of chairs, and we have
done: all but a group of three English
(bagmen) visitors, defiantly at their ease,
who have just come in, and, without bow
or greeting, are beginning, da capo, at the
soup.

Now, all this dinner-time, I have been
trying to enlarge my knowledge of Spanish
gestures. An Italian once told me that in
five minutes with Signor Rossini, he had
observed him use forty-two gestures. I am
sure the Spaniards have very many more
gestures than the Italians. Gesture is the
telegraph language of a hot, lazy country, it
expresses passions, that language is too slow
and inadequate to express. The Spaniards
call each other by a spat out hiss. They draw
you to them by raising the opened hand; they
warn you by wagging the fore-finger at their
nose, they cross themselves, to express
surprise and astonishment. In parting, they
do not tamely kiss the hand; they kiss
the five fingers drawn to a bunch, and
then, spirt them out with a start and a
laugh. They are a curious and an
interesting people.

"Well," says Spanker, in his pleasant,
frank way, as we strolled together to the
hotel door to look for the horses, "I think
we have had a jolly good feed. Suppose,
before you start, you come to my diggings,
and have just a glass of sherry, it puts a
fellow right. I am close by."

WHITE ANTS.

TERMITES are the greatest calamity of
the Indies, says Linnæus, using the word
calamity in the proper sense of the Greek
term (calamitis) a locust, or leaf-cutter. These
insects, like the bees and ants, unite together
in sociable bands, often prodigiously numerous,
composed of three distinct sorts of individuals,
which are said to represent different castes in
society, and have been called the sovereignty,
the nobility, and the people. Most travellers
however give the name of white ants to the
termites, on account of their form, their size,
and their colour. The singular habits of these
insects—habits which make them a formidable
calamity—have given rise to many fables,
ancient and modern.

Herodotus talks about the ants existing
in the country of the Bachrians, which,
though smaller than dogs, were larger than
foxes, and each devoured a pound of meat
every day. In their retreats in the sandy
deserts, these gigantic insects were said to
bore underground habitations, and build up
hillocks of really golden sand which the
Indians came and stole from them at the
peril of their own lives.

Pliny adds to this marvellous story that
the horns of these ants were to be seen in
the temple of Hercules. Even in modern
times, and since the termites have been
pretty well known, many travellers attributed
to them a strong venom which killed men
instantly by its smell or brought on a fatal
fever. But an English naturalist named
Smeathman, completely destroyed all these
stories by publishing, in the Philosophical
Transactions of seventeen hundred and eighty-
one, an account of the termites which are
found in Africa and other climates. In this
account Smeathman made known facts more
strange and marvellous than any of the fables
propagated by the ancients. Indeed, in this
case, as in many others, nature surpasses
most wonderfully everything which man has
imagined.

All the different kinds of termites resemble
each other in form, in their manner of living
and in their good and bad qualities; but they
differ as much as birds in the manner of
building their habitations or nests, and in
the choice of the materials of which the
nests are composed. There are some species
which build upon the surface of the ground,
or partly above and partly beneath; and one
or two species, perhaps more, which build on
the stems or branches of trees, sometimes at
a great height aloft. One species is celebrated
for the vast edifices it rears in the form of a
sugar-loaf, ten or twelve feet in height, and so
solid that the wild cattle mount upon them
without breaking through in the least.