guests, whose palate has
not been blunted by coarse living or seared by strong drink, may
feel that he is drinking something out of the ordinary, and he may
linger over his glass, loath to sip the last drop; but all the
others gulp their wine, or leave it--with the indifference of
ignorance.

Good wine is loquacious; it is a great traveller and smacks of
many lands; it is a bon vivant and has dined with the select of
the earth; it recalls a thousand anecdotes; it reeks with
reminiscences; it harbors a kiss and reflects a glance, but it is
a silent companion to those who know it not, and it is quarrelsome
with those who abuse it.

It seemed a pity that somewhere about the inn, deep in some long
disused cellar, there were not a few--just a few--bottles of old
wine, a half-dozen port of 1815, one or two squat bottles of
Madeira brought over by men who knew Washington, an Yquem of '48,
a Margaux of '58, a Johannisberger Cabinet--not forgetting the
"Auslese"--of '61, with a few bottles of Romani Conti and Clos de
Vougeot of '69 or '70,--not to exceed two or three dozen all told;
not a plebeian among them, each the chosen of its race, and all so
well understood that the very serving would carry one back to
colonial days, when to offer a guest a glass of Madeira was a
subtle tribute to his capacity and appreciation.

It is a far cry from an imaginary banquet with Lucullus to the New
England Saturday night supper of pork and beans which was spread
before us that evening. The dish is a survival of the rigid
Puritanism which was the affliction and at the same time the
making of New England; it is a fast, an aggravated fast, a scourge
to indulgence, a reproach to gluttony; it comes Saturday night,
and is followed Sunday morning by the dry, spongy, antiseptic,
absorbent fish-ball as a castigation of nature and as a
preparation for the austere observance of the Sabbath; it is the
harsh, but no doubt deserved, punishment of the stomach for its
worldliness during the week; inured to suffering, the native
accepts the dose as a matter of course; to the stranger it seems
unduly severe. To be sent to bed supperless is one of the terrors
of childhood; to be sent to bed on pork and beans with the
certainty of fishballs in the morning is a refinement of torture
that could have been devised only by Puritan ingenuity.

At the very crisis of the trouble in China, when the whole world
was anxiously awaiting news from Pekin, the papers sa