FullReads

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A dinner of seven in an old London tavern–a good dinner, the memory whereof is not yet effaced from the tablets of the palate. A soup, a plate of white-bait be-lemoned and red-peppered with exactness, a huge joint of roast beef, from which we sliced at will, flanked by various bottles of old dry Sherry and crusty Port–such Port! (And we are expected to be patriots in a country where it cannot be procured! And the Portuguese are expected to love the country which, having it, sends it away!) That was the dinner–there was Stilton cheese; it were shameful not to mention the Stilton. Good, wholesome, and toothsome it was, rich and nutty. The Stilton that we get here, clouted in tin-foil, is monstrous poor stuff, hardly better than our American sort. After dinner there were walnuts and coffee and cigars. I cannot say much for the cigars; they are not over-good in England: too long at sea, I suppose.

On the whole, it was a memorable dinner. Even its non-essential features were satisfactory. The waiter was fascinatingly solemn, the floor snowily sanded, the company sufficiently distinguished in literature and art for me to keep track of them through the newspapers. They are dead–as dead as Queen Anne, every mother’s son of them! I am in my favorite role of Sole Survivor. It has become habitual to me; I rather like it.

Of the company were two eminent gastronomes–call them Messrs. Guttle and Swig–who so acridly hated each other that nothing but a good dinner could bring them under the same roof. (They had had a quarrel, I think, about the merit of a certain Amontillado–which, by the way, one insisted, despite Edgar Allan Poe, who certainly knew too much of whiskey to know much of wine, is a Sherry.) After the cloth had been removed and the coffee, walnuts and cigars brought in, the company stood, and to an air extemporaneously composed by Guttle, sang the following shocking and reprehensible song, which had been written during the proceedings by this present Sole Survivor. It will serve as fitly to conclude this feast of unreason as it did that:

THE SONG

Jack Satan’s the greatest of gods,
And Hell is the best of abodes.
‘Tis reached through the Valley of Clods
By seventy beautiful roads.
Hurrah for the Seventy Roads!
Hurrah for the clods that resound
With a hollow, thundering sound!
Hurrah for the Best of Abodes!

We’ll serve him as long as we’ve breath–
Jack Satan, the greatest of gods.
To all of his enemies, death!–
A home in the Valley of Clods.
Hurrah for the thunder of clods
That smother the souls of his foes!
Hurrah for the spirit that goes
To dwell with the Greatest of Gods!