s
delectable burden properly hot. It might be that he brought to you a
noble haunch of venison or a splendid roast of pork or a vast leg of
boiled mutton; or, more likely yet, a huge joint of beef uprearing
like a delectable island from a sea of bubbling gravy, with an edging
of mashed potatoes creaming up upon its outer reefs.

If, then, you enriched this person with a shilling, or even if you
didn't, he would take in his brawny right hand a knife with a blade a
foot long, and with this knife he would cut off from the joint a slice
about the size and general dimensions of a horseshoer's apron. And if
you cared for a second slice, after finishing the first one, the
carver felt complimented and there was no extra charge for it. It was
his delight to minister to you.

But, alas, on this day when I came with my appetite whetted by my sea
voyage, and with an additional edge put upon it by the privations I
had undergone since landing, there was to be had no beef at all! Of a
sudden this establishment, lacking its roast beef, became to me as the
tragedy of Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, would be with Hamlet and
Ophelia and her pa and the ghost and the wicked queen, and both the
gravediggers, all left out.

When I had seated myself one of the carvers came to me and, with an
abased and apologetic air, very different from his jaunty manner of
yore, explained in a husky half whisper that I might have jugged hare
or I might have boiled codfish, or I might have one of the awful
dishes. Anyhow, that was what I understood him to say.

This last had an especially daunting sound, but I suppose I was in a
morbid state, anyhow, by now; and so I made further inquiry and
ascertained from him that the restrictions applying to the sale of
meat did not apply to the more intimate organs of the butchered
animal, such as the liver and the heart, and, in the case of a cow,
the tripe. But the English, with characteristic bluntness, choose to
call one of these in its cooked state an offal dish--pronounced as
spelled and frequently tasting as pronounced.

As one who had primed himself for a pound or so of the rib-roast
section of a grass-fed steer, I was not to be put off with one of the
critter's spare parts, as it were. Nor did the thought of codfish, and
especially boiled codfish, appeal to me greatly. I have no settled
antipathy to the desiccated tissues of this worthy deep-sea voyager
when made up into fish cakes. Moreover that young and ad