nce it
resembled putty more than anything else. It even tasted like putty--at
least, like I should imagine putty would taste. To this hour I am not
positive that it was not putty. The garnishing was even more remarkable
than the cheese. All the way round the plate were piled articles that I
had never before seen at a dinner, and that I do not ever want to see
there again. There was a little heap of split-peas, three or four
remarkably small potatoes--at least, I suppose they were potatoes; if
not, they were pea-nuts boiled soft,--some caraway-seeds, a very
young-looking fish, apparently of the stickleback breed, and some red
paint. It was quite a little dinner all to itself.

What the red paint was for, I could not understand. B. thought that it
was put there for suicidal purposes. His idea was that the customer,
after eating all the other things in the plate, would wish he were dead,
and that the restaurant people, knowing this, had thoughtfully provided
him with red paint for one, so that he could poison himself off and get
out of his misery.

I thought, after swallowing the first mouthful, that I would not eat any
more of this cheese. Then it occurred to me that it was a pity to waste
it after having ordered it, and, besides, I might get to like it before I
had finished. The taste for most of the good things of this world has to
be acquired. _I_ can remember the time when I did not like beer.

So I mixed up everything on the plate all together--made a sort of salad
of it, in fact--and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have
never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie Evans's "dags," by
walking twice through a sewer, and was subsequently, on returning home,
promptly put to bed, and made to eat brimstone and treacle.

I felt very sad after dinner. All the things I have done in my life that
I should not have done recurred to me with painful vividness. (There
seemed to be a goodish number of them, too.) I thought of all the
disappointments and reverses I had experienced during my career; of all
the injustice that I had suffered, and of all the unkind things that had
been said and done to me. I thought of all the people I had known who
were now dead, and whom I should never see again, of all the girls that I
had loved, who were now married to other fellows, while I did not even
know their present addresses. I pondered upon our earthly existence,
upon how hollow, false, and transie