The
strange "Milor's" wealth, and the treasures he carried about him, were
the talk, that evening, over all Terracina.
The Englishman took some time to make his ablutions and arrange his
dress for table, and after considerable labor and effort in putting
himself at his ease, made his appearance, with stiff white cravat, his
clothes free from the least speck of dust, and adjusted with precision.
He made a formal bow on entering, which no doubt he meant to be
cordial, but which any one else would have considered cool, and took
his seat.
The supper, as it was termed by the Italian, or dinner, as the
Englishman called it, was now served. Heaven and earth, and the waters
under the earth, had been moved to furnish it, for there were birds of
the air and beasts of the earth and fish of the sea. The Englishman's
servant, too, had turned the kitchen topsy-turvy in his zeal to cook
his master a beefsteak; and made his appearance loaded with ketchup,
and soy, and Cayenne pepper, and Harvey sauce, and a bottle of port
wine, from that warehouse, the carriage, in which his master seemed
desirous of carrying England about the world with him. Every thing,
however, according to the Englishman, was execrable. The tureen of soup
was a black sea, with livers and limbs and fragments of all kinds of
birds and beasts, floating like wrecks about it. A meagre winged
animal, which my host called a delicate chicken, was too delicate for
his stomach, for it had evidently died of a consumption.
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