Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/745

Rh commenced to tremble and the oppression of his chest threatened him with asphyxia. Woe to the waiter or messmate who offended him by word or want of attention in such moments! A fierce blow, a hurled tumbler, or a tremendous kick were the mildest expressions of his impatience. After the defeat of Oudenarde he saved the French army by a masterly retreat that kept him in the saddle for two days and two nights, and then restored himself, not by sleep, but by sitting down to a banquet of sixteen hours, during which he incorporated as many pounds of mutton-pie, if we may believe Chateaubriand.

Calmucks, according to Mr. Schuyler, will travel a hundred miles to stuff themselves with horseflesh at somebody else's expense; and Gordon Gumming mentions a family of Zulu-Caffres—a man, two wives, and four children—who, between noon and sunset, disposed of all the meat, marrow, and intestines of a large zebra, and during the following night picked the bones in a way which only an army of ants could emulate. Vambéry speaks of a Tartar courier, named Thuy-Kasr, who boasted of having eaten, "unassisted and without employment of witchcraft," a large skinful of raisins and a middle-sized pig, leaving nothing but bristles and a few of the larger bones; and once, within fifty hours, even a goat with two kids, together with a bag of dried figs and deep potions of koumiss or fermented mare's milk. Thuy-Kasr must have known the secret of Apicius, "which enabled the adept to prolong his appetite for two days and a night." But such Tartars are not the exclusive product of Central Asia. James Halpin, a Yorkshire man, who exhibited himself in Manchester and other English cities during the first years of this century, thought nothing of eating a dozen pigeons, bones, feathers and all; swallowed trout and larger fishes alive, and won a wager by devouring within two hours all the edibles, including half a cheese and a large quantity of pickles, on a table that had been set for eight persons!

Joseph Kolnicker, born 1809 in Passau, southern Germany, who served as a private soldier for a couple of years, had to be discharged before the expiration of his term on account of his appalling appetite. He would devour raw potatoes, horse-turnips, cabbages in the garden, could empty basketfuls of eggs in a few minutes, and, in spite of all precautions, gained admittance to an officer's pantry or the commissary storerooms now and then, and with most deplorable results. He, too, converted his expensive talent into a source of profit by public exhibitions, and won so many incredible bets that, much to his regret, his renown eventually spread like that of the athlete Milo, and nobody dared to challenge him.

But no modern virtuoso can emulate the giants of antiquity. Claudius, Caligula, Domitian, and Heliogabalus, the imperial gluttons, almost exhausted the resources of the Orbis Romanus by their monstrous voracity. Cicero compares the scene after a Roman banquet to a battlefield; and many of the wealthiest patricians were ruined by one or two