Page:Points of friction.djvu/228

 die to save the secret of making milk-toast.

From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean much offhand information about the wine which the wide world made and drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the fashion of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him encyclopædias, with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of intrinsic realities. Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a certain number of papers on "leather drinking-vessels," and "toasts of the old Scottish gentry." But if the youth be one who browses untethered in the lush fields of English literature, taking prose and verse, fiction and fact, as he strays merrily along, what will he make of the hilarious company in which he finds himself? What of Falstaff, and the rascal, Autolycus, and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded the fatal query which has been answered in 216