Consequently the bar-room beat so common in America is an unknown institution in Germany, and the beery, bloated pimpled faces hanging around public places waiting for invitations are never seen.
A TREATISE ON TREATING.
Mr. Tibbitts most heartily approved of this custom. He remarked that the American system of treating came very nearly ruining him. In Oshkosh he had a very large circle of close friends, who loved him dearly. They were very fond of him, why, he would not say, because he was a modest man. It might have been that they admired his physical graces, or possibly his intellectual endowments—men have tastes that cannot be accounted for. I met one gentleman on this trip who admired the Young Man who Knows Everything; that is, he said he rather liked him.
He was studying law in Oshkosh, and after wrestling all the forenoon with his studies he was, naturally, mentally as well as physically exhausted.
“I tell you,” said Mr. Tibbitts, “when a young and enthusiastic student at law has been poring all day over the pages of Walter Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray, with only an occasional intermission at a beer-shop across the street, without feeling something like a squeezed lemon, he is a strong man indeed. I am physically fragile, and my active mental nature makes fearful drains upon my body.
“And so on my way to my boarding house for dinner I was accustomed to stop over a minute at the Spread Eagle Hotel, to take one solitary cock-tail, which I really needed as a bracer, as it were, to the system; something that would encourage nature to the point of taking in a full meal, a meal that would hold me up to the work of the afternoon.
“Now here is where the infernalism of the American system comes in. There would be at the bar every day at the same hour seven fellows, all good, jolly men, all particular friends of mine, who came there, as I did, for just one drink. Now, understand, I went in there for one drink, which I felt I needed, and one drink only. But seeing the other seven in classical poses about the bar, I could do no less than to ask them to join me, which, in the freshness of youth and the first blush of a strong manhood, they always did promptly. After a minute of joyous conversation, Snedeker would wink at the barkeeper, who would set before us another. More talk, a little more cheerful than before, and Wilson would insist upon all drinking with him. Still more talk, and Adams would consider it an offense if we did not take just one more with him.
“By this time any one of us would have taken something with anybody, for good sense, that faithful though easily overcome sentinel over our passions, had been driven out, and we were on the high road to inebriety. And there we would stand, and stand, taking ‘just another one,’ till we had forgotten all about dinner and everything pertaining to life, except of that article contained in the bottles before us.
“I have known these incidents to cover a great space of time and much territory. I have gone into the Spread Eagle for just one cock-tail, and in consequence of the infernal American system of treating, have found myself a day or two later in St. Louis, paying a most recklessly incurred hotel bill from money obtained by pawning my watch and overcoat. And once I extended the excursion as far as New Orleans, and probably would have gone on through Mexico if delirium tremens had not kindly put in an estopper.
“If we did in America as they do in Germany I should have gone in and taken one cock-tail and gone to my dinner and returned to my studies, and gone home to my supper and have been a good and useful citizen.”