Is preposterous in front and prodigious behind:
Her digestion is sound—for, ’tis very clear,
Her grub she dissolves in an ocean of beer.
Her lord, who is equally round and obese,
Rolls along by her side, with a grunt and a wheeze—
Rolls along, did I say?—they do not roll far,
But rotate within reasonable reach of a bar.
With perhaps some recollection of his early studies of Heine, he takes eye measurements of the average German lady, and winds up with a vivid description of an ordinary German’s meal, and a disgusted—“But the most of these people are gross eaters.”
During 1906, as indeed until his death, he was carrying on a constant correspondence with Prof. Stevenson of New York, in which many questions—geological, social, political, personal, and so forth—came up for discussion. Thus in January 1906 he says, speaking of his sons and their careers:—“All the birds are out of our nest now, all save one wee lassie who remains to brighten our hearts with laughter and song.” By this time his eldest son was established in a practice at Ayr, the next two were working as mining engineers in Borneo, and the youngest was studying music in Germany.