Your Luigi's in America, sure. And if he isn't, send him to Hell."
Sound advice, this.
"What's his surname, anyhow?" he goes on.
You explain once more.
"Why, there's the very man you're looking for. There, standing right in
front of you! He's Luigi, and that's his surname right enough. He don't
know it himself, you bet."
And he points to the good-natured individual. . . .
These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake that
was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and then a
plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the uncooked fat
of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week afterwards); another
one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks, claws and feathers. Such
deeds are sternly reprobated as savagery; still, they occur, and nearly
always as the result of wagers. I wish I could couple them with equally
heroic achievements in the drinking line, but, alas! I have only heard
of one old man who was wont habitually to en-gulph twenty-two litres of
wine a day; eight are spoken of as "almost too much" in these degenerate
days. . . .
Mice, says Movers, were sacrificially eaten by the Babylonians. Here, as
in England, they are cooked into a paste and given to children, to cure
a certain complaint. To take away the dread of the sea from young boys,
they mix into their food small fishes which have been devoured by larger
ones and taken from their stomachs - the underlying idea being that these
half-digested fry are thoroughly familiar with the storms and perils of
the deep, and will communicate these virtues to the boys who eat them.
It is the same principle as that of giving chamois blood to the
goat-boys of the Alps, to strengthen their nerves against
giddiness - pure sympathetic magic, of which there is this, at least, to
be said, that "its fundamental conception is identical with that of
modern science - a faith in the order or uniformity of nature."
I have also met persons who claim to have been cured of rachitic
troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But
only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from those
foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are taken
as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the discomfort
caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a certain kind
of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them in loco infantis.
These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally destroyed after
performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for curing the
scrofulous tendencies of other children. Swallows' hearts are also used
for another purpose; so is the blood of tortoises - for strengthening the
backs of children (the tortoise being a hard animal). So is that of
snakes, who are held up by head and tail and pricked with needles; the
greater their pain, the more beneficial their blood, which is soaked up
with cotton-wool and applied as a liniment for swollen glands.
