"Vain, Aunt Emma? Me vain! Why I don't think myself half as Good-looking as I really am!"
NOT THE CHEESE!
(By an Old-fashioned Fellow)
["I would buy 'Cheshire,' if I could get it; but I cannot. For years I have been doing business in most parts of the country ... and I have hardly ever seen a Cheshire cheese."—"Fromage," in the correspondence on "English Cheese" in the "Daily News."]
So they've found it out at last, the other fellows,
The mystery that for years I have bewailed!
The cheese that with long keeping merely mellows,
The good "Old Cheshire" from our marts has failed!
You cannot get it now for love or money,
That fair, and fine, and flavoursome old stuff,
With its amber glow as warm as virgin honey—
So different from the Yankee's soapy buff!
Don't talk to me of fine Canadian Cheddar,
Of Gloster, or of Dutch, or shams like these;
They may be cheaper, greasier, yellower, redder,
But they're none of 'em a patch on Cheshire Cheese!
Why, I used to munch it every day at luncheon;—
'Twas lovely with a glass of amber ale!
Now a chunk as hard as any Bobby's truncheon,
As dry as yellow soap, and just as pale,
They give me when I ask 'em for Old Cheshire,
Or a clammy stuff called Gruyere—all in holes.
Ah! "a crust of bread-and-cheese" was once a pleasure
To honest appetites and English souls.
I can do with Wiltshire, Dorset, Double Gloster,
Or even good old Stilton at a pinch,
But the modern "Cheshire" Cheese is an impostor,
From whose muckiness malodorous I flinch.
What the dickens have they been and gone and done with it?
The foreigner has mucked our market up,
And it seems to me he's simply having fun with it.
Cheese hard as any steel shot from a Krupp,
Or soft and green and oozy as a swamp is,
They give me, with some comic crackjaw name.
But these foreign frauds—like Cæsars and like Pompeys—
In nastiness seem pretty much the same.
The smell of 'em—sometimes—is something horrid.
They are limp, and locomotive, and—oh, there!
The thought of 'em makes me go chill or torrid,
Whether Gruyere, or Roquefort, or Camembert!
Then the Yankee with his tendencies Titanic
Has sacrificed prime cheese to speed and bulk.
Now they say that in our markets there is panic;
That luckless dairy farmers shake and sulk.
Well upon my Alfred David I don't wonder
If "Cheddar" cheese is rotting by the ton;
For our worship of mere bigness is a blunder
And I only hope the reign of it is done.
But why should boyhood's "Cheshire Cheese" delicious—
Like good old Ribstone pippins—fail and cease?
Of modern "Cheshire" I am most suspicious,
And whatever it may be, it's not "the cheese"!