"Come around to the lecture hall with me to-night and I'll show you," said I.
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. "By George! the dinner's on me!" he said.
He accompanied me to the hall that evening, and sitting in the front row gazed at me quizzically all through my labors—full of sympathy and understanding, however—and after the affair was over and he joined me for my return journey to the hotel he slapped me hard on the back.
"Some gas, all right!" said he. "I wouldn't blow that out if I could!"
Which I took to be one of the most genuine compliments I have ever received.
I have never in any of my trips felt myself in danger of assassination, and yet one of these chance acquaintances of mine involved me by his love of practical joking in an implied ultimatum from a stranger of a most awe-inspiring nature. In leaving a California city some years ago I found myself seated with a group of other travelers just inside the rear door of the observation car. The train had come to a sudden standstill alongside a row of flourishing olive trees, and the traveling man (if I remember correctly he was to Suspenders what Darwin was to the Origin of Species) jumped from the platform and plucked a handful of their fruit from branches overhanging the border of the road. Three of these he passed in to me, and in the innocence of my young heart I immediately plumped one of them into my mouth, and bit into it.
The result I shall not attempt to describe. Our dictionaries have at least a dozen separate and distinct terms signifying that which is bitter, no single one of which is adequate even to intimate the taste of that olive. There are such expressions as "gall and wormwood"; there are adjectives involving such qualifications of taste as "acrid," "nauseous," "sharp," "tangy," "stinging," "rough," and "gamy." None suffices. I have tasted rue, I have tasted aloes, I have tasted quassia, and I have nearly died of squills. As a small boy I once started in to chew a four-grain quinine pill that had been rolled with no ameliorating ingredient to take off the tang of it. But never in my life before or since have I tasted anything comparable to that olive for pure, unadulterated acerbity. It was an Ossa of Gall piled on a Pelion of Wormwood—I might say that it represented the complete reunion of that Gall which the historians of the past have told us was "divided into three parts"—and I suffered accordingly.
But when I saw that traveling man's eye full of twinkling joy fixed upon me I resolved not to let him know that the horrid thing was not the most exquisite bit of ambrosial sweetness that had ever been perpetrated upon my paralyzed palate. I simply chewed quietly ahead, externally as calm and as placid as any cow that ever fletcherized her cud.
"How is it?" asked another traveler, sitting alongside me.
"Delicious!" said I. "Have one."