tin-foil, is monstrous poor stuff,
hardly better than our American sort. After dinner there were walnuts and
coffee and cigars. I cannot say much for the cigars; they are not
over-good in England: too long at sea, I suppose.

On the whole, it was a memorable dinner. Even its non-essential features
were satisfactory. The waiter was fascinatingly solemn, the floor snowily
sanded, the company sufficiently distinguished in literature and art for
me to keep track of them through the newspapers. They are dead--as dead as
Queen Anne, every mother's son of them! I am in my favorite role of Sole
Survivor. It has become habitual to me; I rather like it.

Of the company were two eminent gastronomes--call them Messrs. Guttle and
Swig--who so acridly hated each other that nothing but a good dinner could
bring them under the same roof. (They had had a quarrel, I think, about
the merit of a certain Amontillado--which, by the way, one insisted,
despite Edgar Allan Poe, who certainly knew too much of whiskey to know
much of wine, _is_ a Sherry.) After the cloth had been removed and the
coffee, walnuts and cigars brought in, the company stood, and to an air
extemporaneously composed by Guttle, sang the following shocking and
reprehensible song, which had been written during the proceedings by this
present Sole Survivor. It will serve as fitly to conclude this feast of
unreason as it did that:

THE SONG

Jack Satan's the greatest of gods,
And Hell is the best of abodes.
'Tis reached through the Valley of Clods
By seventy beautiful roads.
Hurrah for the Seventy Roads!
Hurrah for the clods that resound
With a hollow, thundering sound!
Hurrah for the Best of Abodes!

We'll serve him as long as we've breath--
Jack Satan, the greatest of gods.
To all of his enemies, death!--
A home in the Valley of Clods.
Hurrah for the thunder of clods
That smother the souls of his foes!
Hurrah for the spirit that goes
To dwell with the Greatest of Gods!

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce
by Ambrose Bierce

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