The Supper-Table

"Take your places, my dear friends all," cried she; "seat yourselves
without ceremony, and you shall be made happy with such tea as not many
of the world's working-people, except yourselves, will find in their
cups to-night. After this one supper, you may drink buttermilk, if you
please. To-night we will quaff this nectar, which, I assure you, could
not be bought with gold."

We all sat down,--grizzly Silas Foster, his rotund helpmate, and the
two bouncing handmaidens, included,--and looked at one another in a
friendly but rather awkward way. It was the first practical trial of
our theories of equal brotherhood and sisterhood; and we people of
superior cultivation and refinement (for as such, I presume, we
unhesitatingly reckoned ourselves) felt as if something were already
accomplished towards the millennium of love. The truth is, however,
that the laboring oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far
easier to condescend than to accept of condescension. Neither did I
refrain from questioning, in secret, whether some of us--and Zenobia
among the rest--would so quietly have taken our places among these good
people, save for the cherished consciousness that it was not by
necessity but choice. Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of
earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own option
to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again to-morrow.
 

This same salvo, as to the power of regaining our former position,
contributed much, I fear, to the equanimity with which we subsequently
bore many of the hardships and humiliations of a life of toil. If ever
I have deserved (which has not often been the case, and, I think,
never), but if ever I did deserve to be soundly cuffed by a fellow
mortal, for secretly putting weight upon some imaginary social
advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove myself
ostentatiously his equal and no more. It was while I sat beside him on
his cobbler's bench, or clinked my hoe against his own in the
cornfield, or broke the same crust of bread, my earth-grimed hand to
his, at our noontide lunch. The poor, proud man should look at both
sides of sympathy like this.