Servants, too, were stationed at various points from the hall to the
reception-room; and the last one shouted forth the name of the entering
guest. There were, I should think, about fifty guests at this dinner.
Two bishops were present. The Bishops of Chester and New South Wales,
dressed in a kind of long tunics, with black breeches and silk stockings,
insomuch that I first fancied they were Catholics. Also Dr. McNeil, in a
stiff-collared coat, looking more like a general than a divine. There
were two officers in blue uniforms; and all the rest of us were in black,
with only two white waistcoats,--my own being one,--and a rare sprinkling
of white cravats. How hideously a man looks in them! I should like to
have seen such assemblages as must have gathered in that reception-room,
and walked with stately tread to the dining-hall, in times past, the
Mayor and other civic dignitaries in their robes, noblemen in their state
dresses, the Consul in his olive-leaf embroidery, everybody in some sort
of bedizenment,--and then the dinner would have been a magnificent
spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the
powdered and gold-laced servitors. At a former dinner I remember seeing
a gentleman in small-clothes, with a dress-sword; but all formalities of
the kind are passing away. The Mayor's dinners, too, will no doubt be
extinct before many years go by. I drove home from the Woodside Ferry in
a cab with Bishop Burke and two other gentlemen.
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