t, filled with
theology and metaphysics. "By gracious," he said, "it makes all
the other stuff taste like poison." Still he stood for a brief
instant, transfixed with complete bliss. It was apparent to us
that his mind was busy with apple orchards and autumn sunshine.
Perhaps he was wondering whether he could make a poem out of it.
Then he turned softly and went back to his job in a life
insurance office.

As for ourself, we then poured out another tumbler, lit a corncob
pipe, and meditated. Falstaff once said that he had forgotten
what the inside of a church looked like. There will come a time
when many of us will perhaps have forgotten what the inside of a
saloon looked like, but there will still be the consolation of
the cider jug. Like the smell of roasting chestnuts and the
comfortable equatorial warmth of an oyster stew, it is a
consolation hard to put into words. It calls irresistibly for
tobacco; in fact the true cider toper always pulls a long puff at
his pipe before each drink, and blows some of the smoke into the
glass so that he gulps down some of the blue reek with his
draught. Just why this should be, we know not. Also some
enthusiasts insist on having small sugared cookies with their
cider; others cry loudly for Reading pretzels. Some have
ingenious theories about letting the jug stand, either tightly
stoppered or else unstoppered, until it becomes "hard." In our
experience hard cider is distressingly like drinking vinegar. We
prefer it soft, with all its sweetness and the transfusing savour
of the fruit animating it. At the peak of its deliciousness it
has a small, airy sparkle against the roof of the mouth, a
delicate tactile sensation like the feet of dancing flies. This,
we presume, is the 4-1/2 to 7 per cent of sin with which
fermented cider is credited by works of reference. There are
pedants and bigots who insist that the jug must be stoppered with
a corncob. For our own part, the stopper does not stay in the
neck long enough after the demijohn reaches us to make it worth
while worrying about this matter. Yet a nice attention to detail
may prove that the cob has some secret affinity with cider, for a
Missouri meerschaum never tastes so well as after three glasses
of this rustic elixir.

That ingenious student of social niceties, John Mistletoe, in his
famous Dictionary of Deplorable Facts--a book which we heartily
commend to the curious, for he includes a long and most informing
article on ci