The Pursuit of Happiness; A Book of Studies and Strowings (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 Excerpt: ... WELL-SERVED DINNER. 135 del gusto, their married lives would be attuned to a more harmonious accord. Consider the appointments and symmetry of a wellserved dinner in that high style of art which the French have brought to perfection. The mere sight of the table awakens our esthetic feelings, disperses the cares that have infested the day, and softens the asperities which its rude conflicts have developed. The snowy cloth with its embroidered centre-piece, bearing a vase of roses or restful green; the gay triumphs of the potter's skill, flanked by polished metal and diaphanous crystal, whose varied forms hint of the manifold gifts of the grape; the chairs, so disposed as to suggest how we should live our whole lives--ever near to others, but not jostling them. Then how rhythmical the progress of the repast the cold, salt shellfish, followed by the hot and spicy soup, harmonized by the neutral flavor of the fish, its creamy sauce relieved by the bare suspicion of the clean acid of the lemon; and so on through the courses, until the aromatic coffee and the tiny glass of liqueur, redolent of wild herbs or of Alpine flowers, remove both thoughts of food and sense of satiety. The sequence of such a repast is not a conventionality. Medical men as well as epicures know that it is based on physiology. Once, with a friend of like inquiring mind, I ordered a dinner at a restaurant of renown, exactly reversing the usual sequence, beginning with Chartreuse, coffee, and ice-cream, ending with soup, oysters, and hock. The experiment convinced us that the received is the right sequence, and we made no second attempt to put the wrong end foremost. Many will cry that such a dinner as I describe is one for the millionaire and not for the million. They are in error. In Franc...