in my young and idle days and nights, when I was neither
nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching the staid humors
and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.

At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently to
await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took
a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary
life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with a good deal
of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among them an
oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy
tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and
incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another work of high art
was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin; another, the
hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the
head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a
brace of canvasback ducks, in which the mottled feathers were depicted
with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I
suppose, had wrought these subjects of still-life, heightening his
imagination with his appetite, and earning, it is to be hoped, the
privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he
liked best.

Then there was a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern the
mites; and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done, and
looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. All
these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the
genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm;
it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and
thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to
appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial.
There were pictures, too, of gallant revellers, those of the old time,
Flemish, apparently, with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking their
wine out of fantastic, long-stemmed glasses; quaffing joyously,
quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song; while the champagne
bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple tide of
Burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats.

But, in an obscure corner of the saloon, there was a little Picture
excellently done, moreover of a ragged, bloated, New England toper,
stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of
drunkenness. The deat