Toughen And Kiln-Dry
In A Couple Days In A Mild But Unvarying Temperature.
Construct A Cover For This Redoubt In The Same Way And
Of The Same Material.
Fill with stewed dried apples;
aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron;
add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder
on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies.
Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.
- - - - -
RECIPE FOR GERMAN COFFEE
Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory
berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former
into the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation
until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee
and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree;
then set aside to cool. Now unharness the remains of a
once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press,
and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that
pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards
as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket
of tepid water and ring up the breakfast. Mix the
beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep
a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.
- - - - -
TO CARVE FOWLS IN THE GERMAN FASHION
Use a club, and avoid the joints.
CHAPTER L
[Titian Bad and Titian Good]
I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed
as much indecent license today as in earlier times
- but the privileges of Literature in this respect have been
sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.
Fielding and Smollett could portray the beastliness
of their day in the beastliest language; we have plenty
of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are
not allowed to approach them very near, even with nice
and guarded forms of speech. But not so with Art.
The brush may still deal freely with any subject,
however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze
sarcasm at every pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see
what this last generation has been doing with the statues.
These works, which had stood in innocent nakedness for ages,
are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of them.
Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can
help noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous.
But the comical thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf
is confined to cold and pallid marble, which would be still
cold and unsuggestive without this sham and ostentatious
symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blood paintings which do
really need it have in no case been furnished with it.
At the door of the Uffizzi, in Florence, one is confronted
by statues of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with
accumulated grime - they hardly suggest human beings
- yet these ridiculous creatures have been thoughtfully and
conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious generation.
You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little
gallery that exists in the world - the Tribune - and there,
against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf,
you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest,
the obscenest picture the world possesses - Titian's Venus.
It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed - no,
it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand.
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