Oor ain folk times

A RIGOROUS CASTE SYSTEM 155
foot on a higher rung of the social ladder ; but these
cases were rare.
' Tea - pairties,' which were the popular form of
entertainment, were confined exclusively to the special
coterie sanctioned by family tradition and the unwritten
law of custom. If you belonged to a certain set you
could predicate with absolute certainty the company
you would meet at one of these staid ceremonials. If
the banker gave a ' pairty,' you would meet so and so.
If the lawyer, the company would likely be much the
same ; but if one of the Captains' wives was the giver
of the feast, possibly a more miscellaneous gathering
might be met. The laws relating to comestibles and
forms of procedure were also most accurately defined.
You must take just so many cups of tea ; you must
taste three or four kinds of tea cake, and you were
expected to make the same laudatory comments on
each kind, increasing the number of your superlatives
as you proceeded from the first kind of cake to the
last. The preserves had to be pree'ed and praised in
the same way ; and then the small talk had to proceed
by delicate gradations from the vaguely-general to the
minutely- particular -personal. When the latter stage
was reached, the tall caps of the dowagers, with their
nodding plumes, got dangerously close to each other,
and by that time the ' lords and masters ' would be
through their second tumbler of whisky -toddy.-
One quaint illustration of this almost vanished phase
of social life comes back to me as I write. It was a
favourite reminiscence of my wife's mother, who was a
true Montrose lady of the old school, and bridesmaid to
my mother, whose cousin she was.