COFFEEAnd there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded with
showy advertisements--mainly of almost too self-righteous brands of "sheep-dip,"
if that is the name--and I think it is. It is a stuff like tar, and is
dabbed on to places where the shearer clips a piece out of the sheep.
It bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip to it which
makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills. It is not good
to eat. That is, it is not good to eat except when mixed with railroad
coffee. It improves railroad coffee. Without it railroad coffee is too
vague. But with it, it is quite assertive and enthusiastic. By itself,
railroad coffee is too passive; but sheep-dip makes it wake up and get
down to business. I wonder where they get railroad coffee? |
|
 Mark Twain mug by Harmer Sculptures Staffordshire, England. |
To particularize: the average American's simplest
and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well,
in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European
hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy
resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff,
and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The
milk used for it is what the French call "Christian" milk,--milk
which has been baptized. - A Tramp Abroad |
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