We do not get the Brixham papers here, but friends in London tell us that
is what they say. It is the same with the crabs--we have to order them
from London. All local products come _viâ_ London nowadays: London is
like a central ganglion, through which all sensations must travel before
being felt at the outside points where they were really incurred. This is
the case even with Irish patriots: they are made in Ireland, but if you
want them you have to go to London clubs for them. We have only had one
funeral here since I came, and then we got our material from London. He
had gone up to a London hospital--poor fellow!--and that was the end of
him. The village butcher it was, who thus went the way of all flesh, and
all of us went to his funeral and wept, for want of something else to do.
One cannot always be flippant, even on a holiday. Fortunately the butcher
left an aged father, who announced his intention of carrying on the
business, so we dried our eyes and dined, sure of the future. We thought
of the many creatures the deceased had killed--the Juno-eyed oxen, the
tender lambs, the peaceful pigs--and we did not see why we should be so
sentimental over the human species. We are all murderers, and yet we are
ready to gush over the first corpse that comes along. How I envy the
death-bed of a vegetarian!
We are not vegetarians here, but at least we eschew the six-course dinner
which so few travellers ever succeed in shaking off, even in _Ultima
Thule_. The most of modern travelling is a sort of Cook's Tour.
Everywhere the _menu_ is before you, everywhere waves the napkin, like
the flag of civilisation. Nowhere do we eat ourselves into the real life
of the people; everywhere the same monotonous variety of fare in
kitchen-French. In the remotest Orkneys, in the caves of Iona, in the
fjords of Norway, amid the crevasses of the Alps,--'t is the same tale of
_entrées_ and _entremets_. When Dr. Johnson made his tour in the
Highlands, he was allowed to forget he was not taking a walk down Fleet
Street. He interviewed the chiefs in their fastnesses, the cottagers in
their crofts. He broke rye-bread with the shepherd, ate haggis and
porridge with the peasant, and drank a gill of whisky to see "what makes
a Scotchman happy." Behind him he left his dish of tea, and the pet pork
that made the veins of his forehead swell with ecstasy. But to-day the
dinner-gong resounds where Rob Boy's bugle blared, and you may sit behind
your serviette
Where the sun his beacon red
Kindles on Ben Voirlich's head,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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