What they generally have in these places under glass covers, are curiously indigestible meat pies, sandwiches, cheese, cakes and buns. Sometimes at railway stations a hungry Briton buys and partakes of these things, but not often, and never without his glass of something to wash it down. This is the time I forgive him for drinking. It is necessary.
The sandwich is made either of ham or beef, and may be said to be the universal cold refreshment. It is about four inches long by two wide, and is a miracle of thinness. It is the thinnest thing on earth. I have often purchased them, not to eat, but to admire this quality. How bread and meat can be cut so thin, especially bread, is one of the mysteries that never will be solved till I penetrate a public kitchen and see the operation. It is an art I suppose, and the professor of it gets, I presume, a very high salary. He ought to. The bread is stringy enough and the meat tough enough to be cut as thin as might be desired, but the puzzle is how any one can acquire the skill to cut it, that way. But they do it. The English sandwich is more an object of interest to me than the obelisk, and is just about as digestible. I would as soon undertake to eat the one as the other.
The meat pie is made of hashed beef, the fat being put in liberally, enclosed in a wrapper of dough, and all baked together, in some sort of way. I could procure and write out the process, but being a true American and loving the American people I will not. It is utterly indigestible. I ate one at eleven P.M. one night, and woke up in the morning feeling as though I had swallowed the plaster bust of the infant Samuel at prayer that stood on my mantel. The pie is a trifle worse than the sandwich. The cheese cake may be dismissed with the simple remark that it is a trifle worse than the meat pie. The bun is a stand-off as to the others. Altogether they make a frightful stomachic quartet. But the British public, who know nothing of our hash and other luxuries, are content with them, and I don’t know as I shall undertake to reform them in this particular. I pity them, but there are so many things to reform here that I shall not attempt any movement in that direction. Life is very short.
TOBACCO.
The Englishman takes his liquor straight, or neat, as they call it. Mixed drinks are entirely unknown. The sherry cobbler, the mint julep, the fragrant cock-tail, are never heard of in regular English bars, but the drouthy man who drinks, and they all do, takes either brandy or Scotch or Irish whisky, raw from a barrel, and swallows his portion and walks away satisfied. One woman in a famous drinking place was taught by an American to make cock-tails, and the fame of the mixture drew all the Americans to this particular place. The proprietor was sore displeased at this trade, and raised the price two pence above what was regular, to keep it away. It took too much of the girl’s time to compound the mixture.
Drinking does not have the effect upon an Englishman that it does upon an American. The Englishman is a more stolid and phlegmatic man anyhow, and the climate is less exciting. There is not the exhilaration in the atmosphere that there is in America, and the moist humidity that you exist in is very favorable to the consumption of alcoholic drinks. I had got so before I had been here a week, that I think I could have endured a glass of brandy and water. I did not do it, but I say I could have done it.
The prices of liquors average quite as high as in America, and tobacco and everything made of it, is much higher and the quality is vile. A decent cigar, or one counted decent here, costs twenty-five cents, it being of the grade that in New York sells for ten cents.
No tobacco is chewed except by sailors, and the Englishman, very properly, considers it a disgusting habit, only to be practiced by very low people. In consequence of the high price of tobacco, pipes and cigarettes are very generally used. The Englishman of the better class smokes his pipe upon the street, the same as an American does his cigar. He prefers a pipe to a cigar, possibly because it is better, and possibly because it is cheaper. Your Englishman loves dearly to get the value of his money, and he generally does it.
The lover of drink in America, especially our German fellow citizens, are emphatic in their denunciation of the liquor laws of the United States. They ought to live in England a little while to appreciate the privileges they have at home. Hartford, Connecticut, is, I believe, a paradise to those who live there. One old lady who was born and had always lived in Hartford, came to die—an impertinence of Nature, as all Hartford people firmly believe. People should die in other places, but not in Hartford. But this old lady had come to death, and her minister was consoling her.
“I trust, Mrs. Thompson,” he said, professionally, “that you are prepared to die?”