For Instance, About Ten O'clock In The Morning He Knocks
Off For An Hour And Has A Few Cups Of Hard-Boiled Coffee And Some
Sweet, Sticky Pastry With Whipped Cream On It.
Then about four
in the afternoon he browses a bit, just to keep up his appetite
for dinner.
This, though, is but a snack - say, a school of Bismarck
herring and a kraut pie, some more coffee and more cake, and one
thing and another - merely a preliminary to the real food, which
will be coming along a little later on. Between acts at the theater
he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his stomach for supper,
which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or three steins of
thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits as a rosary
of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham. There
are forty-seven distinct and separate varieties of German sausage
and three of them are edible; but the Westphalia ham, in my judgment,
is greatly overrated. It is pronounced Westfailure with the accent
on the last part, where it belongs.
In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in
young cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful. The
only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the
grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded
nerve to charge you, in our money, forty cents for awhole pheasant
and half a peck of cabbage - say, enough to furnish a full meal
for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child.
The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater. There should
never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us
at the Kaiser's court if the Administration at Washington will but
harken to the voice of experience. To the Germans the late Doctor
Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial
capacity; but there was a man who used to live in my congressional
district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive.
He was one of Nature's noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted,
and his name was John Wesley Bass. He was the champion eater of
the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell, and
cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda
crackers on the side.
I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is
no more. At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years
back, he succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in
judgment. After he had established a new world's record by eating
at one sitting five dozen raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam
merry-go-round. At the end of the first quarter of an hour he
fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again,
but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious
condition. I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner's
jury was - the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name - but
among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman had
just naturally been scrambled to death.
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