Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/278

270 and drink, the importance of good ingesta, both fluid and solid, becomes apparent. Among the good things which attached Charles Lamb to this present life was his love of the delicious juices of meats and fishes.

But these things are preliminary, although not impertinent to the main subject, which is Quincy Market. After having perambulated the principal markets of the other leading American cities, I must pronounce it facile princeps among New-World markets. A walk through it is equal to a dose of dandelion syrup in the way of exciting an appetite for one's dinner. Such a walk is tonic and medicinal, and should be prescribed to dyspeptic patients. To the hungry, penniless man such a walk is like the torture administered to the old Phrygian who blabbed to mortals the secrets of the celestial banquets. Autumn is the season in which to indulge in a promenade through Quincy Market, after the leaf has been nipped by the frost and crimson-tinted, when the morning air is cool and bracing. Then the stalls and precincts of the chief Boston market are a goodly spectacle. Athenæus himself, the classic historian of classic gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow at the sight of the good things here displayed, if he were alive. Quincy Market culminates at Thanksgiving time. It then attains to the zenith of good fare.

Cleanliness and spruceness are the rule among the Quincy Market men and stall-keepers. The matutinal display outside of apples, pears, onions, turnips, beets, carrots, egg-plants, cranberries, squashes, etc., is magnificent in the variety and richness of its hues. What a multitude of orchards, meadows, gardens, and fields have been laid under contribution to furnish this vegetable abundance! And here are their choicest products. The foodful Earth and the arch-chemic Sun, the great agriculturist and life-fountain, have done their best in concocting these Quincy Market culinary vegetables. They wear a healthful, resplendent look. Inside, what a goodly vista stretches away of fish, flesh, and fowl! From these white stalls the Tempter could have furnished forth the banquet the Miltonic description of which has been quoted.

Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St. Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market is all that it should be.

Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.—What has become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylæ? The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot also.—Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an end.

"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals