foaming Lowenbrau, which, from time to time, the lad raised to his lips, quaffing deep draughts. And when he set the pot down he whistled the first subject of Beethoven's _Fifth Symphony_. On Sunday afternoons, in the gardens which invariably surround the Munich breweries, the happy mothers, who gather to listen to the band play while they drink beer, frequently replenish the empty nursing bottles of their offspring at the taps from which flows the deep brown beverage.... The food of the French is highly artificial, delicately prepared and served, and flavoured with infinite art: _vol au vent a la reine_ and Massenet, _petits pois a l'etuvee_ and Gounod, _oeuf Ste. Clotilde_ and Cesar Franck, all strike the tongue and the ear quite pleasantly. Des Esseintes and his liqueur symphony were the inventions of a Frenchman.... Hungarian goulash and Hungarian rhapsodies are certainly designed to be taken in conjunction.... Russian music tastes of _kascha_ and _bortsch_ and vodka. The happy, hearty eaters of Russia, the drunken, sodden drinkers of Russia are reflected in the scores of _Boris Godunow_ and _Petrouchka_.... In England we find that the great English meat pasties and puddings appeared in the same century with the immortal Purcell.... But in America we import our cooks ... and our music. As a race we do not like to cook. We scarcely like to eat. We certainly do not enjoy eating. We will never have a national music until we have national dishes and national drinks and until we like good food. It is significant that our national drinks at present are mixed drinks, the ingredients of which are foreign. It is doubly significant that that section of the country which produces chicken _a la Maryland_, corn bread, beaten biscuit, mint juleps, and New Orleans fizzes has furnished us with the best of such music as we can boast. Maine has offered us no _Suwanee River_; we owe no _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ to Nebraska. The best of our ragtime composers are Jews, a race which regards eating and cooking of sufficient importance to include rules for the preparation and disposition of food in its religious tenets.