The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 59, September, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 59, September, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Mr. Killgrove, the damster, came forth and offered us the freedom of his
settlement in a tobacco-box. Tobacco is hospitality in the compactest
form. Civilization has determined that tobacco, especially in the shape
of smoke, is essential as food, water, or air. The pipe is everywhere
the pipe of peace. Peace, then, and anodyne-repose, after a day of
travel, were offered us by the friendly damster.
A squad of lumbermen were our new fellow-citizens. These soldiers of the
outermost outpost were in the regulation-uniform,--red-flannel shirts,
impurpled by wetting, big boots, and old felt-hats. Blood-red is the
true soldierly color. All the residents of Damville dwelt in a great
log-barrack, the Hotel-de-Ville. Its architecture was of the early
American style, and possessed the high art of simplicity. It was solid,
not gingerbreadesque. Primeval American art has a rude dignity, far
better than the sham splendors of our mediaeval and transition period.
Our new friends, luxurious fellows, had been favored by Fate with a
French-Canadian cook, himself a Three of Freres Provinciaux. Such was
his reputation. We saw by the eye of him, and by his nose, formed for
comprehending fragrances, and by the lines of refined taste converging
from his whole face toward his mouth, that he was one to detect and
sniff gastronomic possibilities in the humblest materials. Joseph
Bourgogne looked the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him; eyes small and
discriminating; nose upturned, nostrils expanded and receptive; mouth
saucy in the literal sense. His voice, moreover, was a cook's,--thick in
articulation, dulcet in tone. He spoke as if he deemed that a throat was
created for better uses than laboriously manufacturing words,--as if the
object of a mouth were to receive tribute, not to give commands,--as if
that pink stalactite, his palate, were more used by delicacies entering
than by rough words or sorry sighs going out of the inner caverns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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