The urns are hissing, the plate is shining; the father of the house, standing up, reads from a gilt book for three or four minutes in a measured cadence.

The members of the family are around the table in an attitude of decent reverence; the younger children whisper responses at their mother's knees; the governess worships a little apart; the maids and the large footmen are in a cluster before their chairs, the upper servants performing their devotion on the other side of the sideboard; the nurse whisks about the unconscious last-born, and tosses it up and down during the ceremony.
I do not sneer at that--at the act at which all these people are assembled--it is at the rest of the day I marvel; at the rest of the day, and what it brings.

At the very instant when the voice has ceased speaking and the gilded book is shut, the world begins again, and for the next twenty-three hours and fifty-seven minutes all that household is given up to it.

The servile squad rises up and marches away to its basement, whence, should it happen to be a gala-day, those tall gentlemen at present attired in Oxford mixture will issue forth with flour plastered on their heads, yellow coats, pink breeches, sky-blue waistcoats, silver lace, buckles in their shoes, black silk bags on their backs, and I don't know what insane emblems of servility and absurd bedizenments of folly.

Their very manner of speaking to what we call their masters and mistresses will be a like monstrous masquerade.
You know no more of that race which inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries.