Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread. In Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas; and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens.
And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls—and the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country.
Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according to a recipe older than the Revolution. If I had my way about it no living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a brimming tumbler of that eggnog—except a man with a drooping red mustache.
By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern seaboard again any one of them, if he caught fire, would burn for about four days with a clear blue flame, and many valuable packing-house by-products could be gleaned from his ruins. It would bind us all, foreigner and native alike, in closer ties of love and confidence, and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe, instead of eastward from America.
Let's do it sometime—and appoint me conductor of the expedition!
Chapter X. Modes of the Moment; a Fashion Article
Among the furbearing races the adult male of the French species easily excels. Some fine peltries are to be seen in Italy, and there is a type of farming Englishman who wears a stiff set of burnishers projecting out round his face in a circular effect suggestive of a halo that has slipped down. In connection with whiskers I have heard the Russians highly commended. They tell me that, from a distance, it is very hard to distinguish a muzhik from a bosky dell, whereas a grand duke nearly always reminds one of something tasty and luxuriant in the line of ornamental arborwork. The German military man specializes in mustaches, preference being given to the Texas longhorn mustache, and the walrus and kitty-cat styles. A dehorned German officer is rarely found and a muley one is practically unknown. But the French lead all the world in whiskers—both the wildwood variety and the domesticated kind trained on a trellis. I mention this here at the outset because no Frenchman is properly dressed unless he is whiskered also; such details properly appertain to a chapter on European dress.
Probably every freeborn American citizen has at some time in his life cherished the dream of going to England and buying himself an outfit of English clothes—just as every woman has had hopes of visiting Paris and stocking up with Parisian gowns on the spot where they were created, and where—so she assumes—they will naturally be cheaper than elsewhere. Those among us who no longer harbor these fancies are the men and women who have tried these experiments.