A hot rabbit pye, with buttered pease and a pottle of mulled claret
Rhubarbe pasty, with barley wine to ease Mr. Hoyle’s digestions
Plague water for the hott weather
“Having done suitable homage to this judicious nourishment” (Mr. Mistletoe proceeds), “Mr. Hoyle would have brought to him his own yard of clay, which he would leisurely fill with the best pure Virginia leaf, gazing about him the while upon the impatient faces of his friends who were anxious to get to the cards. ‘Never indulge the carnal appetites immoderately in hot weather,’ he would say, blowing out a long blue whiff into the cool twilight of the old taproom, panelled in magnificent dark walnut. This was the last word uttered, for when the Master took his seat at the card table no man dared speak. A sacred quiet filled the place as he reached for the pasteboards and deftly cut for the deal, tossing back his lace cuffs over his lean yellowish wrists, the colour (he was something bilious) of old piano keys. The rest was silence, with only the fall of the cards and the occasional clink of a bottle when Mr. Hoyle refilled his vase of Burgundy, which he always drank while gaming. A life of abstemious control, he said, was needful for one who must keep his wits alert.”
L. E. W.
We are continually obtaining new and piercing glimpses into human life and character. We are now able to assert, without fear of rebuttal, that even men of unblemished intellect and lofty, serene understanding have always some particular point of frailty at which morals, virtue, and integrity collapse in a dark confusion of spiritual wreckage.
Reconsidering the above sentence it seems to need a little clarification. We shall have to explain what we mean, and can only do so by referring, with painful verity, to the Leading Editorial Writer.
L. E. W. came into our kennel yesterday morning and saw lying on our desk a newly published detective novel that a publisher had sent us. “Oh,” he said, “What’s this?” and began looking it over. We were rather busy at the moment, and paid no particular heed, but looked up a minute later to see him slipping out of our hutch with the book under his arm.