Supper.  This Supper consists of fruit, followed by buckwheat cakes, followed by meat or eggs; and to eat one’s way through it induces a curious sense of standing on one’s head.  After two days I discovered a remedy for this undesired dizziness.  I turned the menu upside down, and ordered a meal in the reverse order.  The Supper itself was a success; but the waitress (who, in the winter, teaches school in Texas) disapproved of what she deemed my frivolous proceeding.  Her eyes took on an inward look beneath the pedagogical eye-glasses; and there was a distinct furrowing of her forehead.  Thereafter I did not dare to overturn the menu, but ate my way heroically backward.  After all, our prandial prejudices are merely the result of custom.  There is no real reason why stewed prunes should not be eaten at three A.M.

But this philosophical reflection reminds me that there is no such hour at Chautauqua.  At ten P.M. a carol of sweet chimes is rung from the Italian campanile; and at that hour all good Chautauquans go to bed.  If you are by profession (let us say) a writer, and are accustomed to be alive at midnight, you will find the witching hours sad.  Vainly you will seek companionship, and will be reduced at last to reading the base-ball reports in the newspapers of Cleveland, Ohio.

At the Athenaeum you are passed about, from meal to meal, like a one-card draw at poker.  The hotel is haunted by Old Chautauquans, who vie with each other to receive you with traditional cordiality.  The head-waitress steers you for luncheon (I mean Dinner) to one table, for Supper to another, and so on around the room from day to day.  The process reminds you a little of the procedure at a progressive euchre party.  At each meal you meet a new company of Old Chautauquans, and are expected to converse:  but many (indeed most) of these people are humanly refreshing, and the experience is not so wearing as it sounds.

But you must not imagine from all that I have said that the life of the lecturer at Chautauqua is merely frivolous.  Not at all.  You get up very early, and proceed to Higgins Hall, a pleasant little edifice (named after the late Governor of New York State) set agreeably amid trees upon a rising knoll of verdure; and there you converse for a time about the Drama, and for another time about the Novel.  In each of these two courses there were, perhaps, seventy or eighty students,—­male and female, elderly and young.  I found them much more eager than the classes I had been accustomed to in college, and at least as well prepared.  They came from anywhere, and from any previous condition of servitude to the general cause of learning; but I found them apt, and interested, and alive.

Now and then it appeared that their sense of humor was a little less fantastic than my own; but I liked them very much, because they were so earnest and simple and human and (what is Whitman’s adjective?) adhesive.