Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/103

 healthy, sad-looking cheese. It looked like a cheese that had seen trouble. In appearance it resembled putty more than anything else. It even tasted like putty—at least, like I should imagine putty would taste. To this hour I am not positive that it was not putty. The garnishing was even more remarkable than the cheese. All the way round the plate were piled articles that I had never before seen at a dinner, and that I do not ever want to see there again. There was a little heap of split-peas, three or four remarkably small potatoes—at least, I suppose they were potatoes; if not, they were pea-nuts boiled soft,—some caraway-seeds, a very young-looking fish, apparently of the stickleback breed, and some red paint. It was quite a little dinner all to itself.

What the red paint was for, I could not understand. B. thought that it was put there for suicidal purposes. His idea was that the customer, after eating all the other things in the plate, would wish he were dead, and that the restaurant people, knowing this, had thoughtfully provided him with red paint for one, so that he could poison himself off and get out of his misery.

I thought, after swallowing the first mouthful, that I would not eat any more of this cheese. Then it occurred to me that it was a pity to waste it after having ordered it, and, besides, I might get to like it before I had finished. The taste for most of the good things of this world has to be acquired. I can remember the time when I did not like beer.

So I mixed up everything on the plate all together—made a sort of salad of it, in fact—and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie Evans's "dags." by walking twice through a sewer, and was subsequently,