Book excerpt: Excerpt from Around the Tea-Table The duties of the day are clamoring for attention; at the noon-day dining-hour some of the family are absent; but at six o'clock in the evening we all come to the tea-table for chit-chat and the recital of adventures. We take our friends in with us - the more friends, the merrier. You may imagine that the following chapters are things said or conversations indulged in, or papers read, or paragraphs made up from that interview. We now open the doors very wide and invite all. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.