Adieu, dear Elise; I wish you the happiness of getting both the dinner and the young folks in order.

He, he, he!" Gunilla went, dinner-time came, and with it the guests and the Judge, who had spent the whole morning in the business of his own office, out of the house.
Emelie, the Colonel's widow, was elegant in the highest degree; looked handsome, and distinguished, and almost outdid herself in politeness; but still Elise, spite even of herself, felt stiff and stupid by the side of her husband's "old flame." Beyond this, she had now a great distraction.
"Oh, that the chickens may be nicely done!" was the incessant master-thought of Elise's soul; and it prevailed over the Pope, the Church of St.Peter's, Thorwaldsen and Pasta, and over every subject on which they talked.
The hour of dinner was come, and yet the dinner kept the company waiting.

The Judge, who expected from everybody else the punctuality which he himself practised, began to suffer from what Elise called his "dinner-fever," and threw uneasy glances first at the dining-room door, and then at his wife, whose situation, it must be confessed, was not a very enviable one.

She endeavoured to look quite calm, but often whispered something to the little Louise, which sent her very importantly in and out of the room.

Elise's entertainment, both that part which was audible, and that which was inaudible, was probably at the moment carried on something after the following fashion: "It must be inexpressibly pleasant to know," (ah, how unbearably long it is!) "it must be very interesting." (I wish Ernst would fire again on his "old flame," and forget dinner.) "Yes, indeed, that was very remarkable." (Now are those chickens not roasted!) "Poor Spain!" (Now, thank goodness, dinner is ready at last--if the chickens are only well done!) And now to dinner! A word which brightens all countenances, and enlivens all tempers.