The Mystery of Metropolisville | Page 5

the Sod Tavern, that this earthly tabernacle stood in the midst of an
ideal town. The map had probably been constructed by a poet, for it
was quite superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact.
According to the map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by
Seminary, Depôt, Court-House, Woolen Factory, and a variety of other
potential institutions, which composed the flourishing city of New
Cincinnati. But the map was meant chiefly for Eastern circulation.

Charlton's dietetic theories were put to the severest test at the table. He
had a good appetite. A ride in the open air in Minnesota is apt to make
one hungry. But the first thing that disgusted Mr. Charlton was the
coffee, already poured out, and steaming under his nose. He hated
coffee because he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he
shoved it away was the exact measure of his physical craving for it.
The solid food on the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes,
half-baked salt-rising bread, and salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a
reader of the _Water-Cure Journal_ of that day, and despised meat of
all things, and of all meat despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for
Jews; and of all forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously
indigestible. So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the
pork, picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously
avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged himself
by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of which most of the
nutriment had been soaked.
Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the
meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by idees in Minnesoty. And
with the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to
discuss dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the
express purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his
voracious eating of it.
"Simply despicable," grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the
greasy pork. "I do despise such food."
"Eats it like he was mad at it," said Driver Jim in an undertone.
But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.
Couldn't live in a cold climate without meat. Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey,
the broad-shouldered, sad-looking man with side-whiskers, who
complained incessantly of a complication of disorders, which included
dyspepsia, consumption, liver-disease, organic disease of the heart,
rheumatism, neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was
never entirely happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue of
his disgusting symptoms--Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his daughter,
inveighed, in an earnest crab-apple voice, against Grahamism. He

would have been in his grave twenty years ago if it hadn't been for
good meat. And then he recited in detail the many desperate attacks
from which he had been saved by beefsteak. But this pork he felt sure
would make him sick. It might kill him. And he evidently meant to sell
his life as dearly as possible, for, as Jim muttered to Charlton, he was
"goin' the whole hog anyhow."
"Miss Minorkey," said the fat gentleman checking a piece of pork in
the middle of its mad career toward his lips, "Miss Minorkey, we
should like to hear from you on this subject." In truth, the fat gentleman
was very weary of Mr. Minorkey's pitiful succession of diagnoses of
the awful symptoms and fatal complications of which he had been
cured by very allopathic doses of animal food. So he appealed to Miss
Minorkey for relief at a moment when her father had checked and
choked his utterance with coffee.
Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father. She was
thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy. She had a high, white forehead,
a fresh complexion, and a mouth which, if it was deficient in sweetness
and warmth of expression, was also free from all bitterness and
aggressiveness. Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young
lady as education goes. She was more--she was a young lady of reading
and of ideas. She did not exactly defend Charlton's theory in her reply,
but she presented both sides of the controversy, and quoted some
scientific authorities in such a way as to make it apparent that there
were two sides. This unexpected and rather judicial assistance called
forth from Charlton a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed
with modest pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss
Minorkey's forehead he inwardly comforted himself that the only
person of ideas in the whole company was not wholly against him.
Albert Charlton was far from being a "ladies' man;" indeed, nothing
was more despicable in his eyes than men who frittered away life in
ladies' company. But this did not at all prevent him from being very
human himself