A Dish Of Asparagus Has Been Known To Develop
Fine Acoustic Properties, And In Certain Quarters There Is A Crying
Need For A Sound-Proof Soup; But Even So, And Admitting These
Things As Facts, We Are But Mere Beginners In This Line When
Compared With Our European Brethren.
In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a
particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction,
who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening.
He was what you
might call a human hazard - a golf-player would probably have
thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings,
using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every
other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he
could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could
make playing on a fife.
There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats
his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches
round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell
at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat
his spaghetti at all - he inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand
and starts it down his throat. He then respires from the diaphragm,
and like a troupe of trained angleworms that entire mass of spaghetti
uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him - en
masse, as it were - and making him look like a man who is chinning
himself over a set of bead portieres. I fear we in America will
never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus. It takes a
nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries.
Chapter IX
The Deadly Poulet Routine
Under the head of European disillusionments I would rate, along
with the vin ordinaire of the French vineyard and inkworks, the
barmaid of Britain. From what you have heard on this subject you
confidently expect the British barmaid to be buxom, blond, blooming,
billowy, buoyant - but especially blond. On the contrary she is
generally brunette, frequently middle-aged, in appearance often
fair-to-middling homely, and in manner nearly always abounding
with a stiffness and hauteur that would do credit to a belted earl,
if the belting had just taken place and the earl was still groggy
from the effects of it. Also, she has the notion of personal
adornment that is common in more than one social stratum of women
in England. If she has a large, firm, solid mound of false hair
overhanging her brow like an impending landslide, and at least
three jingly bracelets on each wrist, she considers herself well
dressed, no matter what else she may or may not be wearing.
Often this lady is found presiding over an American bar, which is
an institution now commonly met with in all parts of London. The
American bar of London differs from the ordinary English bar of
London in two respects, namely - there is an American flag draped
over the mirror, and it is a place where they sell all the English
drinks and are just out of all the American ones.
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