Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/237

Rh my arrival, and insisted that I impart to him the details of my venture. The chap seemed vastly interested, and his sheet the following morning published the following:

Colonel Marmaduke Ruggles of London and Paris, for the past two months a social favourite in Red Gap's select North Side set, has decided to cast his lot among us and will henceforth be reckoned as one of our leading business men. The plan of the Colonel is nothing less than to give Red Gap a truly élite and recherché restaurant after the best models of London and Paris, to which purpose he will devote a considerable portion of his ample means. The establishment will occupy the roomy corner store of the Pettingill block, and orders have already been placed for its decoration and furnishing, which will be sumptuous beyond anything yet seen in our thriving metropolis.

In speaking of his enterprise yesterday, the Colonel remarked, with a sly twinkle in his eye, "Demosthenes was the son of a cutler, Cromwell's father was a brewer, your General Grant was a tanner, and a Mr. Garfield, who held, I gather, an important post in your government, was once employed on a canal-ship, so I trust that in this land of equality it will not be presumptuous on my part to seek to become the managing owner of a restaurant that will be a credit to the fastest growing town in the state.

"You Americans have," continued the Colonel in his dry, inimitable manner, "a bewildering variety of foodstuffs, but I trust I may be forgiven for saying that you have used too little constructive imagination in the cooking of it. In the one matter of tea, for example, I have been obliged to figure in some episodes that were profoundly regrettable. Again, amid the profusion of fresh vegetables and meats, you are becoming a nation of tinned food eaters, or canned food as you prefer to call it. This, I need hardly say, adds to your cost of living and also makes you liable to one of the most dreaded of modern diseases, a disease whose rise can be traced to the rise of the tinned-food industry.