It is a public mark of disrespect. If you don't regard us enough to throw away or keep away your cigar when you join us, just don't join us. Keep your own side of the street. Nobody wants you; at least I don't. Walk alone if you like, or with whomsoever you can, but if you walk with me, you shall "behave yourself."But how frightfully hungry these long coach stages make one! especially among the mountains. famine lurks in that wild air, and is ever springing upon the unwary traveller. The fact was, however, that I had the most dreadful appetite all the way through. "Really," Halicarnassus would say, "it is quite charming to see you in such fine health," being at the same time reduced to a state of extreme disgust at my rapacity. He made an estimate, one day, that I had eaten since we started thirty-one and a half chickens, and I have no doubt I had; for chickens were my piece de resistance as well as entrees; and then they WERE chickens, not old hens,--little specks of darlings, just giving one hop from the egg-shell to the gridiron, and each time the waiter only brought you one bisegment of the speck, all of whose edible possibilities could easily be salted down in a thimble. I don't say this by way of complaint. A thimbleful of delicacy is better than a "mountain of mummy"; and here let me put in a word in favor of that much-abused institution, hotels.
I cannot see why people should go about complaining of them as they do, both in literature and in life. My experience has been almost always favorable. In New York, in Saratoga, in Canada, all through the mountain district, we found ample and adequate entertainment for man and beast. Trollope brings his sledge-hammer down unequivocally. Of course there will be certain viands not cooked precisely according to one's favorite method, and at these prolonged dining-tables you miss the home-feeling of quiet and seclusion; but I should like to know if one does not travel on purpose to miss the home-feeling? If that is what he seeks, it would be so easy to stay at home. One loses half the pleasure and profit of travelling if he must box himself up with his own party. It is a good thing to triturate against other people occasionally. For eating, there are, to be sure, the little oval dishes that have so aroused Trollopian and other ire; and your mutton, it is true, is brought to you slice-wise, on your plate, instead of the whole sheep set bodily on the table,--the sole presentation appreciated by your true Briton, who, with the traditions of his island home still clinging to him, conceives himself able, I suppose, in no other way to make sure that his meat and maccaroni are not the remnants of somebody else's feast. But let Britannia's son not flatter himself that so he shall escape contamination. His precautions are entirely fruitless. Suppose he does see the whole beast before him, and the very bean-vines, proof positive of first-fruits; cannot the economical landlord gather up heave-shoulder and wave-breast and serve them out to him in next day's mince-pie? Matter revolves, but is never annihilated.
Ultimate and penultimate meals mingle in the colors of shot-silk.
Where there is a will, there is a way. If the cook is of a frugal mind, and wills you to eat driblets, driblets you shall eat, under one shape or another. The only way to preserve your peace, is to be content with appearances. Take what is set before you, asking no questions for conscience' sake. If it looks nice, that is enough. Eat and be thankful.
Trollope says he never made a single comfortable meal at an American hotel. The meat was swimming in grease, and the female servants uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow, and provoking.
Occasionally they are a little slow, it must be confessed; but I never met with one, male or female, who was uncivil, impudent, or provoking. If I supposed it possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us, the possible synonyme of Pharisai** or stupidity, Ishould recommend to him Lord Chesterfield's assertion, that a man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's bad manners. For the greasy meats, let him forego meats altogether and take chickens, and he will not find grease enough to soil his best coat, if he should carry the chick away in his pocket. We always found a sufficient variety to enable us to choose a wholesome and a toothsome dinner, with many tempting dainties, and scores of dishes that I never heard of before, and ordered dubiously by way of experiment, and tasted timorously in pursuit of knowledge. As for the corn-cake of the White Hills, if I live a thousand years, I never expect anything in the line of biscuit, loaf, or cakes more utterly satisfactory. It is the very ultimate crystallization of cereals, the poetry and rhythm of bread, brown and golden to the eye, like the lush loveliness of October, crumbling to the touch, un-utterable to the taste. It has all the ethereal, evanishing fascination of a spirit. Eve might have set it before Raphael. You scarcely dare touch it lest it disappear and leave you disappointed and desolate. It is melting, insinuating,--a halo, hovering on the border-land of dream and reality, beautiful but uncertain vision, a dissolving view.
I said something of the sort to Halicarnassus one morning, and he said, Yes, it was--on my plate. And yet I have never had as much as I wanted of it,--never. The others were perpetually finishing their breakfast and compelling me, by a kind of moral violence, to finish mine. I made an attempt one morning, the last of my sojourn among the Delectable Mountains, when the opposing elements had left the table prematurely to make arrangements for departure, and startled the waiter by ordering an unlimited supply of corn-cake. Like a thunder-bolt fell on my ear the terrible answer: "There isn't any this morning.
It is brown bread." Me miserable!
