Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/30

 French, some mysterious tincture of the Mediterranean moves in his strictly Saxon blood. A man of riotous and ungovernable humor, frequently halting on the streets until his paroxysms of outrageous mirth will permit further locomotion, the only thing he never laughs at is food. He sees the city not as a vast social riddle, nor as a network of heavenly back-alleys, but as a waste of irrelevant architecture, dotted here and there with oases of good meals. Mention some spot in the city and his eye will brighten like a newly sucked glass marble. "Oh, yes," he cries, "that's just round the corner from the Cafe Pancreas, where they have those admirable ortolans!" To eat a meal in company with the Epicure is like watching a great artist at work. He studies the menu with the bitter concentration of a sculptor surveying the block of marble from which the statue is to be chiseled. He does not assassinate his appetite at one swoop with mere sum total of victuals. He gently woos it to annihilation, so that he himself can hardly tell just at what point it dies. He eats with the skill and cunning of a champion chess player, forgoing a soup or an entree in the calculating spirit of Lasker or Marshall, sacrificing pawns in order to execute some coup elsewhere on the board. Waiters, with that subtle instinct of theirs, know as soon as they see that delicately rounded figure enter the salle à manger, that here is a man to be reckoned with.

You may imagine, then, my privilege in being